In a report from earlier his year, we found out that Seagate even managed to increase its HDD shipments with around 2% when compared to the previous year. Where exactly was that “crisis?”

Now Seagate proudly announces it has decided to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repurchase a considerable amount of its outstanding ordinary shares. Spending 2.5 billion dollars less than a year after buying Samsung’s HDD division for another 2 billion doesn’t really seem like a company “suffering” from a “crisis.”

Western Digital, too, has just announced its fiscal third quarter financial results. Despite recently acquiring HGST (that’s Hitachi’s HDD division) in March last year and also “suffering” from a “difficult crisis,” they’ve made a net income of 146 million dollars, or 62 cents per share.

Well, seagate was expected to increase their shipments as they were largely unaffected by the flooding.

Profits in general will go up because hard drives have a certain stickiness to them that causes demand to not fluctuate much quickly in reaction to a price hike just like gasoline....


.... Gawd, did my introductory Econ class actually prove useful for once?

Supply and Demand is always in everything from your HD's to agriculture to shampoo. Right now in FL a "bumper crop" of tomatoes have caused prices to plunge. Farmers have so many they can't even pay workers to harvest the things. Think they are going for like 25lbs for $1 or something like that.

And the OP is surprised how? Almost everything that is labeled as an emergency really isn't.

Honestly, though, it's kind of hard to fake a lot of electronics factories in Thailand being under 10+ feet of water. No matter what you believe about market manipulation/etc, a whole bunch of manufacturing capability did get hosed.

All I was saying was that it's absurd to believe that due to flooding there was an HDD shortage. Like Thailand is the only place in the whole of the world that HDDs can be made.

Posted 2011-10-19 06:26:25
The impending hard drive shortage -- and possible price hikes
Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline
By Woody Leonhard

If you're going to need hard drives this year or early next year, it would be smart to get your sources locked in now.

Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand -- notably including the largest Western Digital plant -- were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online. Thailand is a major manufacturer of hard drives, and the shutdowns have reduced the industry's output by 25 percent.

Western Digital, the largest hard disk manufacturer, makes more than 30 percent of all hard drives in the world. Its plants in Ayutthaya's Bang Pa-In Industrial Estate and Pathum Thani's Navanakorn Industrial Estate together produce about 60 percent the company's disks. Both were shut down last Wednesday. (Western Digital also has a major plant in Malaysia that hasn't been affected by the floods, so some production will likely shift to that plant.)

Fourth-ranked hard-disk manufacturer Toshiba makes more than 10 percent of the world's hard disks, and half of its capacity is in Thailand. Toshiba's plant has also been closed due to flooding.

Key disk component suppliers have also been hit. Nidec, which makes more than 70 percent of all hard drive motors, has temporarily suspended operations at all three of its plants in Thailand, affecting 30 percent of its production capacity. Hutchinson Technologies, which makes drive suspension assemblies, has also suspended operations due to power outages, although it says it will shift operations to its U.S. plant.

Seagate, the second-largest hard disk manufacturer, has two plants in Thailand, but neither is in the flooded parts of the country. Seagate notes that "the hard disk drive component supply chain is being disrupted and it is expected that certain component in the supply chain will be constrained." Translation: Component prices are going up, at least for some parts.

I don't doubt that at all. I never said the flooding never happened.

Fuel crisis of the 1970's? Oh, noes! Ders no mo gas fo my cars! Da government says da werld is out of gas!

Same issue today with fuel shortages and "going green"/"renewable resources".

Thailand is under water? NO MORE HARD DRIVES! EVER!

See the pattern?

All I was saying was that it's absurd to believe that due to flooding there was an HDD shortage. Like Thailand is the only place in the whole of the world that HDDs can be made.

Not certain what you are referring to with the second half, but I'll just link to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory for the first half. Any oil shortage isn't about depletion of actual oil, but depletion of CHEAP oil.