Hard drive shortage to worsen before it gets better

Thailand struggles to contain flood waters from ravaging its lowland areas, industrial output across the board has been stifled by the floods and in particular hard drive production from Thailand has crashed. The flood waters are expected to recede within a few weeks but the clean up operation could take several months and as you may already know the Western Digital production facility in Thailand was hit significantly. It could take nearly 6 months for hard drive producers to catch up with production shortage and fulfill production quotas and as a result the figures for this year don’t look good at all.

IDC and iSuppli believe the floods will result in a 25 percent to 28 percent overall market shortage over the next six months. Overall shipments are down from 173 million in Q3 to 125 million in Q4 which is a steep drop representing the 25-28% market shortage. Western Digital has been hit worst losing around 75% of production for Q4. IDC expects hard drive prices to go up by about 10 percent in Q4 but as you may have seen already prices are increasing by much more than this, about 25%-75% in most cases which is a real problem for the consumers. The only positive about this for the PC market is that SSD sales are expected to shoot up as they are produced elsewhere and production has not been affected.

Source: ComputerWorld