Computer Prices To Rise Because Of Thailand Flooding

THAILAND - The floodwaters receded weeks ago from this sprawling industrial zone, but the streets are littered with detritus, the phones do not work and rusted machinery has been dumped outside warehouses that once buzzed with efficiency.
Before Thailand’s great flood of 2011, companies like Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi produced electronics and computer components that were exported around the world. Now of the 227 factories operating in the zone, only 15 percent have restarted production, according to Nipit Arunvongse Na Ayudhya, the managing director of the company that manages the Nava Nakorn industrial zone, one of the largest in Thailand and located just north of Bangkok.
“The recovery has not been that easy,” Mr. Nipit said in an interview Friday on the sidelines of a meeting where he sought to soothe anxious foreign factory managers.
The slow recovery here is having global consequences. Before the floods, Thailand produced about 40 percent to 45 percent of the world’s hard disk drives, the invaluable and ubiquitous storage devices of the digital age. It is now becoming clear that it will be months — significantly longer than initially expected — before production of hard drives returns to antediluvian levels.
The upshot for consumers worldwide is that they may face a prolonged period of higher prices for hard drives. In the United States, certain models are currently 40 percent to 50 percent more expensive than before the floods, levels that may remain for several months, analysts say.
“By the end of the year, HDD price could come back to preflood level for certain drives,” said Fang Zhang, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, a market forecasting company based in the United States. He used the acronym for hard disk drives.
John Coyne, the president and chief executive of Western Digital, which makes about one-third of the world’s hard drives, said this past week that production in the company’s factories in Thailand would not return to preflood levels until September. About 60 other companies that produce hard drives and components were flooded, he said.