Hitachi Hires Hard Drive Veteran to Lead Key Technology Business Group

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) has appointed Pantelis Alexopoulos to the position of Vice President and General Manager, Head Business Group. Alexopoulos is a 26-year veteran of the hard disk drive industry, whose career has spanned numerous major hard drive vendors and component suppliers in the industry. He will be based at Hitachi's Cottle Road site in South San Jose.

In leading Hitachi's Head Business Group, Alexopoulos will have responsibility for revenue performance, profit and loss, volume growth and cost management for one of five major business groups. The head—which performs the important task of reading and recording data—is one of the two key components of the hard drive (the other is the media upon which data is stored). Head technology requires deep understanding and application of nanotechnology, magnetics and metrology, which enable data recording with nanometer precision.

"We are very pleased to add to our executive team the deep-seated experience that Pantelis has accumulated over the past several decades in the hard drive industry," said Robert Holleran, chief operating officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "We are confident that Pantelis' direction will extend Hitachi's head technology leadership, which has brought us the quarter-terabyte 2.5-inch drive and terabyte 3.5-inch drive."

Alexopoulos has spent his entire professional career in the hard drive industry, beginning with a thorough technical foundation established within IBM's hard drive business. This was followed by nearly a decade at Seagate and Maxtor.

For the past year, Alexopoulos has served as chairman and chief executive officer for TDK Fujitsu Philippines Corp., a Philippines-based joint venture between TDK and Fujitsu in the head-gimbal-assemby sector. During his eight-year tenure at Maxtor, Alexopoulos served as CTO and Executive Vice President, responsible for Corporate Development, Engineering and Advanced Technology. Prior to that, he was executive director of Advanced Concepts at Seagate.

Alexopoulos began his career at IBM's Almaden Research Center, where he spent 14 years in various managerial and technical positions.

Hitachi Global Storage
Hitachi