Flooding Takes Major Hard Drive Plant Offline; Shortages Predicted 203
snydeq writes "Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline, InfoWorld reports. '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.' Toshiba's Thailand plants have also been affected, as have key disk component suppliers, including Nidec and Hutchinson Technologies."
Re:Say Hello To Eternal Price Hikes (Score:4, Informative)
Did all manufacturers get hit by the flood? If not, lawsuits of price fixing might follow if they all start to increase prices for no reason.
Lol. You do realize that a 25% reduction in output means the same demand must be met by fewer manufacturers, right? When demand remains constant and supply suddenly decreases, the natural market reaction is a price increase until demand decreases to match supply (or until supply recovers).
Sure, the other manufacturers may be able to increase supply somewhat to counter this, but prices are bound to increase in the short term. Not due to price fixing, but due to normal market forces.