[ale] HDD prices to spike - flooding in Thailand

[Jim Kinney]

Its worse than even Aaron thinks. The biggest issue is ALL the motors for
drives are made in factories now under water there.
At work, orders for drives are being canceled by suppliers until they get a
firm price from existing stockpiles.  But as we all know, tech makets are
huge into 'just in time' production.  So the stockpiles are basically just
supplies awaiting pickup on shipping. The last ready drives were shipped
out while roads were still passable so only the factories in Ireland and
Malaysia are still running. The Irish has excess capacity available as they
were being phased out for Thailand.  But, no motors means no drives.
So drives get shipped to vendors with connections and deep pockets.
It looks like the time when the ram boat sank in a storm in 1996 but this
will hit everywhere for about 6 months.
On Oct 31, 2011 1:17 PM, "arxaaron" <arxaaron at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 2011/10/31, at 10:38 , Rich Faulkner wrote:
>
> > Don't know if any of you have been following this but the
> > flooding in Thailand has shutdown manufacturing of a
> > significant part of the HDD industry.  I'm seeing price spikes
> > on HDD's and indications are it's going to get worse.
> >   Street talk is that it may be May or June before Western
> > Digital recovers from the losses due to flooding:
> >
> >
> http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/miscellaneous/thailand-floods-to-significant-impact-wd
> > Thailand Floods to Significantly Impact HDD Industry
> >
> > Prices in some cases have doubled already.  If you need
> > drives you better grab them before they're either gone or
> > too expensive to purchase...
> >
> > Rich in Lilburn
>
> Smells like a huge case of fear monger marketing to me
> (corporape amuika at it's shiny best...)
>
> The profiteering prices will only be gouging the gullible
> people who panic.  The smart money will just wait it out
> go back to buying hard drives after the fear inflated bubble
> has popped.
>
> peace
> aaron
>
>
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