TDK and NHK Spring are involved in a class action lawsuit. Key components of hard drives are accused of price manipulation for more than ten years.

A class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that multiple suppliers of hard drive suspension components have engaged in price monopoly for more than ten years. The core defendants include Japanese electronics giants TDK and NHK Spring. According to the complaint, the cantilever components produced by these companies are widely used in about 97% of the world's mechanical hard drives, making the case actually implicating the entire hard drive industry supply chain.

The cantilever component is a precision component inside a traditional mechanical hard disk that is rarely noticed by ordinary users but is crucial. It is a small mechanical "arm" that is responsible for positioning the read and write heads with extremely high precision, allowing them to hover with a very small gap above the high-speed rotating disk and complete the read and write operations. As the storage density of hard disks continues to increase and the fault tolerance space continues to tighten, the technical threshold of this component in terms of manufacturing process, engineering tolerances and mass production difficulty has also significantly increased, forming a pattern with a limited number of suppliers and a highly concentrated market.

The indictment alleges that between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2016, relevant cantilever component suppliers engaged in price manipulation through coordinated pricing and other methods, pushing up the cost of hard drive production. These increased costs do not stop at the component manufacturing end, but are transmitted down the supply chain, and are ultimately reflected in the purchase prices of branded hard drive manufacturers and the terminal prices paid by consumers when purchasing independent hard drives or computers with pre-installed hard drives.

According to the accusation, the cantilever components involved in the case are widely supplied to mainstream hard drive brands such as Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba, but these complete machine brands themselves are not listed as defendants in this lawsuit. The plaintiff believes that it is precisely because core components are in the hands of a few suppliers that the upper reaches of the industry chain have the ability to influence the entire market price level through collusion. This is why the case has attracted attention from an antitrust perspective.

This is not the first time similar accusations have entered judicial proceedings. As early as 2019, a class action lawsuit in Canada surrounding the same industry and similar behaviors was accepted by the court and will continue to advance in 2022 after the appeal was dismissed. The current new U.S. case is highly similar to the Canadian case in terms of accusation content, and also focuses on price monopoly issues in the field of hard disk cantilever components.

As of now, no trial date has been set for this class action lawsuit in the United States, and the court has not yet made any ruling on liability or compensation. However, if the plaintiff wins the lawsuit in the future, enterprise users and individual consumers who purchased affected hard drive products between 2003 and 2016 may be included in the potential compensation scope.

Based on currently public information, eligible businesses and individual users in the United States will automatically be included in the class action by default unless they actively opt out. Relevant parties in the case have set up a special website for the public to query information and handle exit procedures. The currently announced opt-out deadline is August 23, 2026.