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Seagate Technology PLC

Type	Public limited company
Traded as	NASDAQ: STX NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Industry	Computer storage
Predecessor	Shugart Technology
Founded	1979; 38 years ago (1979) (as Shugart Technology)
Founder	Alan Shugart Tom Mitchell Doug Mahon Finis Conner Syed Iftikar
Headquarters	Cupertino, California, United States (operational), Dublin, Ireland (legal domicile)
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Stephen J. Luczo (Chairman, CEO)
Products	Hard disk drives, hybrid drives and solid-state drives
Revenue	US$11.16 billion (FY2016)
Operating income	US$0.445 billion (FY2016)
Net income	US$0.248 billion (FY2016)
Total assets	US$82.52 billion (FY2016)
Total equity	US$1.593 billion (FY2016)
Number of employees	45,487 (FY2016)
Subsidiaries	LaCie
Website	www.seagate.com

Seagate Technology PLC (commonly referred to as Seagate) is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978, as Shugart Technology. Since 2010, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Cupertino, California, United States.

Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Today Seagate along with Western Digital dominates the HDD market. Much of their growth has come through acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation's Imprimis division, makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsung's HDD business in 2011.

Seagate Technology (then called Shugart Technology) was incorporated on November 1, 1978, and commenced operations with co-founders Al Shugart, Tom Mitchell, Doug Mahon, Finis Conner and Syed Iftikar in October 1979. The company came into being when Conner approached Shugart with the idea of starting a new company to develop 5.25-inch HDDs which Conner predicted would be a coming economic boom in the disk drive market. The name was changed to Seagate Technology to avoid a lawsuit from Xerox's subsidiary Shugart Associates (also founded by Shugart).

The company's first product, the 5-megabyte ST-506, was released in 1980. It was the first hard disk to fit the 5.25-inch form factor of the Shugart "mini-floppy" drive. The hard disk, which used a Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding, was a hit, and was later released in a 10-megabyte version, the ST-412. With this Seagate secured a contract as a major OEM supplier for the IBM XT, IBM's first personal computer to contain a hard disk. The large volumes of units sold to IBM, the then-dominant supplier of PCs, fueled Seagate's early growth. In their first year, Seagate shipped $10 million of units to consumers. By 1983, the company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $110 million.