A Year After Thailand Flooding, Hard Drive Prices Remain High 214
crookedvulture writes "Last October, Thailand was hit by massive flooding that put much of the world's hard drive industry under water. Production slowed to a crawl as drive makers and their suppliers mopped up the damage, and prices predictably skyrocketed. One year later, production has rebounded, with the industry expected to ship more drives in 2012 than it did in 2011. For the most part, though, hard drive prices haven't returned to pre-flood levels. Although 2.5" notebook drives are a little cheaper now than before the flood, the average price of 3.5" desktop drives is up 35% from a year ago. Prices have certainly fallen dramatically from their post-flood peaks, but the rate of decline has slowed substantially in recent months, suggesting that higher prices are the new norm for desktop drives."
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
why didn't they just "charge extra" before the floods?
They didn't have an excuse they could fall back on if they ramped them up with no reason?
No excuse is needed. Public companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. If they were knowingly selling for less that the market would bear, without a sound strategic reason, they would be guilty of misconduct. Since most (all?) of these drives are imported, selling below the fair market price could also be illegal under various "anti-dumping" laws.
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's a Seagate 7200.14 then no, they're not the same.
The variant they put in external enclosures is crippled via firmware to 150MB/s max transfer rate and has ~24ms average access time.
The noncrippled ones do >200MB/s on the outer cylinders and ~18ms avg access time.
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the equiibrium was lower. Now one of the few players would have to charge less, but they have no incentive to do so. Game theory at work.
Exactly. When their costs went up they all had to raise prices but when costs go down they can all wait for someone else to lower prices first. No collusion or cartel is required.
Re:Its the economy (Score:5, Interesting)
QE3 is $40E+9 per month. Helicopter Ben is monetizing (printing) about 37% of our deficit. This eventuality has been predicted for the US for decades. Buy gold with cash and hide it.
However, that's probably not the reason for the pricing histogram in the linked story. The prices of some models have fallen while others have remained high. That differential wouldn't exist if it were exclusively due to currency; exchange rates make no distinction between popular 2.5" disks and everything else.
The models where prices have fallen are the high volume models that OEMs install in laptops and DVRs. Everything else remains expensive.
That actually makes a lot of sense. OEMS buy those 2.5" drives under contract in large quantities. These are the lines that got highest priority to recover after the flood, so the supply of these parts recovered quicker and prices have fallen faster.
Basically the flood caused a realignment of resources and this is reflected in the prices we see now.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)