thailand

Seagate Technology said its sales will be stronger than expected as it is one of the few hard-drive makers to navigate the floods in Thailand successfully.

Flooding in Thailand has wreaked havoc on the hard-drive supply chain, and shortages are likely into 2012. Seagate facilities were largely unscathed, but the company said that its “ability to manufacture hard-disk drives has been impacted due to external component supply constraints.”

Nevertheless, Seagate’s outlook is looking strong. Seagate said that it will ship about 43 million units in the December quarter (fiscal second quarter) with revenue of $2.8 billion.

Wall Street … Read more

After Hewlett-Packard reported earnings today, CEO Meg Whitman said that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are coming to HP to get servers because of the dearth of hard disk drives.

Whitman was responding to a question from an analyst during today's earnings conference call about companies like Google and Facebook building their own servers and not getting them from the traditional sources--PC makers like HP and Dell.

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said.

Whitman continued. "[But] … Read more

PC makers are likely to weather any hard-drive shortages in the fourth quarter since they have inventory of supplies as a buffer. The first quarter, however, could be tricky, according to Jefferies.

In a research note previewing Dell and Hewlett-Packard earnings Nov. 15 and Nov. 21, respectively, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek outlined the aftershocks from the floods in Thailand. As noted previously, flooding in Thailand has rattled hard-drive makers and their suppliers. Western Digital took the biggest hit.

Misek concludes that the fourth quarter for PC makers like Dell and HP should be solid. However, these strong quarters aren’t … Read more

The fallout of the hard-disk drive shortage is now raining down on consumers, according to analysts and resellers.

The most immediate impact is rising prices and falling inventory of standalone drives, in the wake of the flooding in Thailand where roughly half of the world's drives are made. "Prices are going up. We're running out of stock and no longer taking back orders," said a sales representative at PC Connection, a major online reseller.

"We have half the stock we used to have," the sales rep added.

A sales representative at CDW, another major … Read more

The scarcity of hard disk drives will only get worse in the coming weeks and months, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

"We could run out of drives by the end of November," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard said in an interview Tuesday while discussing the shortage in the wake of the severe flooding in Thailand, where roughly half of the world's production of HDDs takes place.

"Availability is really going to tighten up. I'm seeing prices quoted anywhere from up 10 to up 60 percent," he said. And Richard said he is … Read more

Barclays Capital has slashed its PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter due to the shortage of hard disk drives and continued weakness in the PC market, according to reports.

The investment bank cut its global PC growth forecast for the fourth quarter to 4.3 percent from 7.2 percent "due to continued weak demand and a shortage of hard drive disks (HDD) resulting from the flooding in Thailand," according to a number of Asia-based outlets such as the China Post, citing a Barclay's research note.

And the bank didn't stop there, lowering its full-year … Read more

What's an 8-foot-tall Lego man doing on the beaches of Siesta Key Village, Florida? We don't have the answer, but it's the third one that's washed ashore in the last three years--similar occurances were reported three years ago in Brighton, England, and Zandvoort, Holland; each bearing the same cryptic messaging: "NO REAL THAN YOU ARE."

Yahoo News did the dirty work and inquired about the phenomenon to Lego's assistant brand relations manager, who vehemently denied, on record, any affiliation with the stunt, eliminating the possibility of it being a viral stunt. Who knows, maybe it was printed on a 3D imaging device by the folks at MakerBot!… Read more

The humble hard disk drive may become a more precious commodity in the coming months, according to analysts and Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made this very clear this week in the company's earnings conference call, referring to the impact of the floods in Thailand. "Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point," he said.

Cook continued. "We would say that our primary exposure is … Read more

General Motors just opened a new $200 million, diesel engine plant in Rayong, Thailand.

The new engine plant, which is adjacent to the GM's vehicle manufacturing plant, will employ 500 workers and have the capability to manufacture about 120,000 engines per year.

GM expects to source $94 million worth of Thai-built components for the production of engines at its Rayong facility by 2012, the company said in a press release.

The first engines to be manufactured at the facility are for the new Chevy Colorado pickup. GM revealed the Colorado Show pickup at the Bangkok International Motor Show … Read more