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HDDs Get Costlier. Prices Grow By 50 Percent. Due to the heavy floods in Thailand, HDD prices have overgrown by 50 percent in the last week alone. The manufacturing of hard disk drives has been affected due to these floods, which has adjacently affected the prices of hard disk drives. Alone Thailand provides 25 percent of the world’s HDD production. Even most of the HDD component’s manufacturers are from Thailand. Hence, the floods in Thailand have hampered the overall business of hard disk drives in the global market, as reported by iSupply, a components research agency. The research agency also explains the possibility of the degrading of adverse affects of this condition on other IT industries. The agency believes that the shortage of HDDs in the market, may also lead to the downfall of other computer markets, such as Server, PCs and Storage vendors. “There is suddenly no supply of HDDs in the market. We are finding it difficult to explain the sudden price hike. Prices for 500GB HDD have shot up by Rs 1,000 since the past couple of days,” Dinesh Nair, VP, Aldous Glare Systems (a prominent sub-distributor in South) said. The market price of 500GB SATA drive has jumped to Rs 3,200, just few days post to the Thailand floods. It was Rs 2,050 last week. Due to this rapid price hike in the HDDs, many suppliers are alleging the black marketing of HDDs. The major industries are also shocked with this sudden hike and are prompting to make changes in their business strategies. As confirmed by Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager, Seagate India, “Seagate expects that the industry demand will significantly outstrip supply at least for the December quarter, and the supply disruption will continue for multiple quarters. Our production is NOT constrained by either internal component supply or by our ability to assemble finished product. Rather, we are constrained by the availability of specific externally sourced components. We are aligning production schedules and product builds to best support both our suppliers and our customers,” Nair of Adlous Glare said that a chance of 20-30 percent growth in the next few weeks would not be surprising, seeing the present scenario. He informed “We are trying to arrange as much stock to support our partners.” “In the next few months hoarding of HDDs would be an activity many distributors would indulge in globally and in India. And unless any clarity emerges about when the production from Thailand will normalize, there will be quite a few price fluctuations in the market,” said another person from the industry, J Ramesh, VP, Ralco Synergy, Chennai. No one knows where this price hike will end up, but all show a possibility of further growth in the HDD prices in coming weeks. |
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