Flooding in Thailand – The Ripples of Price Increases in Hard Drives

Photo from: Agadez

It was a little less than a year ago that beyond the personal devastation in Japan, born from the earthquake and tsunami rocking Japanese manufacturing. That impacted everything from the ‘glue’ that makes integrated circuits to oxygen sensors for cars.

It is too early in the reporting process for the mainstream media to catch on to the impact of the flooding in Taiwan.

And we here at TRCBNews, at the core of the process is made up of a bunch of geeks. Collectively we are seeing a fair amount of noise being made about the sudden price increases in hard drives.

Certainly this makes sense since much of the final assembly of the ambiguous hard drive is done in that country. While the evidence is purely anecdotal, the comments that are passing our inbox certainly is not.

One only has to look at pricing and supply chain to see the impact.

Desktops and laptops that were already manufactured are seeing zero impact. However, the prices for bare hard drives is already seeing supply and demand adjustments (price gouging).

It is already at a point where the intelligent geek is ordering a similar capacity/interface requirement in an external version, and foregoing the case and power supply.

Further, the rumor mill is already suggesting to expect to pay more for a system containing a hard drive, certainly no later than Valentine’s Day (14. February 2012).

As we are already seeing a dramatic increase of the price of hard drives as bare standalone units, combined with the warnings of system prices moving up in 6 to 8 weeks, all we can say is be prepared to forecast upwards on the price per gigabyte for hard drive storage at least until Easter 2012.

In a related sector another one of our geek compatriots has reported the inability to get an Okidata printer for same reason. That is no big deal, until your business needs to run on carbonless forms.

Our apologies for not being more precise. This trend only started showing up in our inbox 36 hours ago. However, the number of people in agreement astounded even us.

All we can say is, forewarned is forearmed. Stay tuned.

(Correction) The original headline read Taiwan, instead of Thailand. This error was caused by a ‘speako’. It is like a typographical error, that occurs when training a computer to use speech recognition. TRCBNews apologizes for the error and has corrected the title.

Short URL: http://www.trcbnews.com/?p=6887

Posted by Helena Noel on Dec 5 2011. Filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry