Hard disk prices double after flood

[Qtis]

I feel bad for the people there.

As for the HDD's, we still have China...

It would seem that even though we do have china, which is where most of the stuff is made anyways, either the companies have lost lots of money due to the flood and are trying to make up for it by upping the price or the sellers are taking advantage of the news and marking everything up.

Actually China doesn't make all the component (especially flash memory/HDD). Thus the impact of certain countries like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and such is quite big, just like we are seeing now.


-Qtis

 

[Satangel]

I bought a 2TB internal hard drive last week from Amazon for £80 because I found out about the flood in Thailand recently and the impact it had on these prices. I had the 2TB HDD originally bookmarked on eBuyer that was originally selling for £60 a couple of weeks ago, then all of a sudden the price began to escalate at a vicious rate. It is currently over £200 on that site now, and it's been steadily increasing over the past couple of days. I'm not even planning on upgrading my PC for another half year, but I had to snag the drive that Amazon was selling out of their remaining stock before it took the same hit as every other competitor has been doing.

Don't be expecting a recovery for at least another 2 quarters, that's for sure. I'd say that we should be seeing a good recovery by this time next year.

That long?! I thought it would be fixed by Christmas this year, wtf.

 

[Wizerzak]

I bought a 2TB internal hard drive last week from Amazon for £80 because I found out about the flood in Thailand recently and the impact it had on these prices. I had the 2TB HDD originally bookmarked on eBuyer that was originally selling for £60 a couple of weeks ago, then all of a sudden the price began to escalate at a vicious rate. It is currently over £200 on that site now, and it's been steadily increasing over the past couple of days. I'm not even planning on upgrading my PC for another half year, but I had to snag the drive that Amazon was selling out of their remaining stock before it took the same hit as every other competitor has been doing.

Don't be expecting a recovery for at least another 2 quarters, that's for sure. I'd say that we should be seeing a good recovery by this time next year.

Pfff, yeah right, it's not gonna take 6 MONTHS to clean up a factory and employ some of the millions of workers desperate to earn w/e little wages HDD companies pay them.

I predict everything will be back to normal by Christmas, if not, February max.

 

[pyromaniac123]

Even if it takes 6 months to recover from all this, retailers aren't going to lower prices afterwards.

 

[zefyx]

I'm glad I picked up my two 3TB Hitachi's last month.

 

[Wizerzak]

Even if it takes 6 months to recover from all this, retailers aren't going to lower prices afterwards.

Sure they will, lower prices = more sales

 

[KinGamer7]

Pfff, yeah right, it's not gonna take 6 MONTHS to clean up a factory and employ some of the millions of workers desperate to earn w/e little wages HDD companies pay them.

I predict everything will be back to normal by Christmas, if not, February max.

I'm not pulling this out of thin air, I'm afraid. Here's one article of many that are portraying the same message:

The hard drive market is reacting to the heavy floods in Thailand.
Prices for hard drives have jumped by as much as 50 percent within one week, market research firm IHS said. About a quarter of all hard drives are manufactured in Thailand and it appears that all major vendors are affected in some way.

Western Digital previously said that it may see a revenue decline of about 60 percent in the current quarter and told German publication Golem.de that it will be able to produce only 22 to 26 million drives this quarter, instead of the planned 58 million units. A spokesperson said that WD "currently waits for the factories to dry" to be able to restart its manufacturing tools. What makes matters worse are the usually thin profit margins in the HDD industry, which means that manufacturers typically have only five to seven days of material supply.

A Seagate manager told CRN India that the company expects and "acute" shortage of drives and that the manufacturer expects prices to increase. However, there was no information how sharp this increase can be. Both WD and Seagate said that the floods in Thailand have created a problem for the industry that will take several quarters to resolve.