DeviceGuru

Google’s upcoming online data storage service, aka “Gdrive,” could generate more profit than real hard drives from the likes of Seagate, one market analyst speculates.

Rumors of Google’s GDrive, flying around for months, have included purportedly leaked screenshots of a “Platypus” client application (pictured below) and installation instructions for Windows and for Linux.

Analyst firm iSuppli suggests that an online data storage service “could be very lucrative for Google.” According to senior analyst Krishna Chander, “Google’s plan has simple economics: It can make more money in the storage business than the companies that actually make HDDs.”

Given Google’s vast server farm, huge economy of scale for mass storage capacity, and enormous Internet bandwidth resources, the company is well positioned to offer such a service, should it wish to do so.

Chander estimates that 4.2 million people would use Google’s rumored free online storage service.

Assuming $50 ad revenue per user per year, this would generate $210 million in annual revenues, he conjectures. On the expense side, he estimates a cost of $12.50 for each user’s 50GB of free storage, resulting in $52.5 million of total cost and over $150 million of gross margin.

“While a typical HDD supplier makes about an 18 percent gross margin for a desktop-PC-class hard drive, Google could command a gross margin of 75 percent,” Chander said. “This would give Google more than four times the rate of return compared of the HDD suppliers.”

Read iSupply’s complete Gdrive analysis here.