RISTAC - My Personal Blog

A few days back I watched the news regarding the terrible floods hitting Thailand. A thought crossed my mind in regards to the ever changing world and a feeling of sorriness for those affected but that was it. Nothing more than a 60 second barrage of thoughts running through my head before my own minor problems invaded my brain space.

For a few weeks now I have been watching hard drive prices, each week I would perform a quick search paying special attention to the price of Western Digital 2TB drives. I have been watching these prices steadily drop and as I was in no major rush to get one I had a magical figure in mind of £55.00 so a little like watching a share price to hit that buy, buy, buy figure I waited.

Shock and horror when I performed my weekly search yesterday, some stores had more than doubled in price, how could that be? A quick snoop around and I soon discovered that those terrible floods in Thailand were to blame for the price increase, Western Digital the worlds largest supplier of hard drives was now under water.

Okay so they might be my favourite HD supplier but I am not paying the kind of figures I have been seeing so let’s go for my second choice, Samsung. Again my face dropped when I saw the prices being quoted, how can this be, Samsung have not been affected by the floods or have they? It seems that Western Digital and other tech firms such as Nidec who are based in Thailand also supply components for all the other hard drive manufacturers, Nidec supplying the small motors.

It gets worse; predictions are that we shall see prices triple in the weeks ahead until things start to get back to normal around March 2012. Then there will be a backlog to sort out and then preference shall be given for first shipments to arrive for the OEM market which includes makers of PC systems. It is certainly going to feel like you are sitting on a gold mine for anyone lucky enough to be sitting on a few 1Tb and 2TB drives at the moment.

It isn’t just hard drives, Sony have reported that there will be a delay in the launch of some of their new cameras and lenses as they have a plant affected by the floods as do car giants Nissan and Honda who have also been hit. I suspect worse is yet to come as the scale of the supply chain breakdown starts to get noticed in the weeks ahead but hardly surprising when you think that some 4 million acres (if you can’t imagine that imagine 16 times the size of Hong Kong) have been flooded.