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Intel Revenue Dives $1bn On Hard Disk Shortage
nk497 writes "The hard disk shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand will cost Intel $1 billion in lost revenue, the company said. It had initially predicted revenue of $14.7bn this quarter, but that will now be $13.7bn, it said. 'Sales of personal computers are expected to be up sequentially in the fourth quarter,' Intel said. 'However, the worldwide PC supply chain is reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases as a result of hard disk drive supply shortages.'"
The perfect time for Intel to push SSDs?
Is Intel still making a profit? Is Intel at least breaking even?
Ideally, if a company is breaking even, then who cares what its revenue is.
Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft; it represents an imbalance of energy/value/worth in an exchange (one party to the exchange is taking advantage of the other party).
Well, who would have foreseen this?!? Aside about 10,000 slashdotters, that is.
Planning to build some heavy lifting workstations, have them all spec'd out and all, but everything is on hold until the price on 3TB drives comes back down.
Really sad, too, as I believe Windows CHKDSK corrupted one of my older drives with it's half-arsed attempt to clean it. Anyone know of a good tool to try recovering directory structure and data?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yup.
"Getting laid" simply doesn't take that much time.
Leaves plenty of time for other persuits...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page (For linux, but you can do some NTFS recovery as well. Not for anyone who hates command line)
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ Windows oriented but has some Linux stuff in it too.
A little scary for us, as we have precisely one 1TB drive on the shelf right now. One of our notebooks had its drive go south, and I had to rob an old 80gb from a dead notebook. Still, I'm holding out. I don't particularly feel like paying three times or more what they were worth a few months ago.
I'm hopefully going to get some budget for some custom routers and I'll be going with SSDs so my next project won't be impacted.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Intel sells computer components, mostly processors, chipsets and ethernet controllers. Each computer uses one CPU, one chipset, one ethernet controller (occasionally two) etc.
The majority of those parts are sold (either directly or indirectly via a motherboard manufacturer) to OEMs who turn them into computers. Hard drives are a key component in most computers (occasionally you see a SSD only machine but it's pretty rare) so if the OEMs are supply constrained on hard drives they will reduce their purchases of everything else to match (companies HATE keeping stock these days).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The loss seems all big and impressive and such until you actually bother to look at both numbers and realize that it really isn't so bad after all. What this really goes to show just how BIG the PC business is and how a relatively small setback can be portrayed as this dire tragedy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I tried to order a Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drive and Newegg and they wanted $400. I ended up buying two Seagate Expansion USB 2.0 3TB Drives for $199 each and I removed the Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drives from the enclosures and saved $400 on my total order.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...
Somewhere I saw the figure on how much of their income comes from commodity PCs vs servers - servers are where the money is. Servers without drives would still be in demand, but servers with drives wouldn't meet demand. Not sure what the split is now. I don't think Intel makes much off storage devices.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Intel does not sell computers. They sell processors to people who sell computers. Those people can't built computers without hard drives, so they are buying fewer processors. Not that hard to figure out.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft
Like the risk of investors cashing out because they see better returns elsewhere.
IMHO: I'm surprised that SSD manufacturers are not taking advantage of the HDD shortage and giving deals left and right. Intel could profit greatly right now lowering their SSD prices just slightly. PC manufacturers will benefit by selling computers and the end user will get that "speedy" system for only a slight increase in price. The higher price will definitely pay for itself considering the boot and operating speed of a SSD over HDD. Granted that's with the consideration you didn't buy a system with 1GB of memory and a Celeron proc running Win7.
Obviously anyone looking for large capacity drives is still SOL. I know some local stores in the area are still selling drives for reasonable prices until they run out. I doubt they'll bother to stock some or any at all after that. I'm sure they don't want to be left holding $2-300 drives that will be selling for at least half that a couple months from now.
On another note, who had the bright idea of creating a single point of failure? I wonder if WD, Seagate, etc setup their networks all with single points of failure. I understand it's cheaper but if you can't make drives, you're not making money.
"Getting laid" simply doesn't take that much time.
In that case, you're probably doing it wrong...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Someone doesn't understand the basic concept of "news".
Oblivion Awaits
Good thing we can't make hard drives any where else in the world! I love globalization. I don't know anyone in the states that could be trusted to work at a plant making hard drives. They'd expect to be able to pay for food, shelter, and clothing, and we can't have that!
Or, and potentially just as bad for Intel, they're using a lower-speced and likely lower margin CPU to make up some of the cost difference due to the HDD.
Amen. 8 hours of work, 2 hours of drinking, and 6 hours of sex leaves me pretty much no time for personal pursuits. I pass out at the end of the day drunk, dehydrated, and happier than you can imagine.
Just because we foresaw it, does not mean we were allowed to buy in anticipation, or to skip part of our 2 month purchasing approval process to get our stuff in before this happened.
Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.
I'm gonna go with "none of them".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I agree that it seems fishy. To say "I was guessing I would make $14, but it turned out I only made $13" and then to make the leap to "therefore I lost $1" seems wrong. You didn't lose $1, you just guessed wrong. Then to go farther and say "I can say that the $1 I lost was all because of this reason." makes me want to ask how you could know this. To me it seems like a good case of "correlation is not causation."
So, they're using AMD processors?
So, they're using AMD processors?
I'm certain AMD are feeling the pinch, as well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you can't do, report: you're smart enough to s/loses/dives but not smart enough to s/dives/forestalls.
Now the reader who ordinarily fails to distinguish "dives" from "loses" as processed through the filter of law-of-the-jungle public-company quarterly reporting intervals will fail to notice the giant Bill Gates reality-distortion-apparatus strapped to face.
They offered some major, like $100+, rebates recently. However even so, they are still pricey. SSDs are coming down in price, but for most users they are still too much money. While most people don't need the multi-TB drives they can get these days, they also can't function very well with a tiny 80GB SSD. Somewhere in the 200-500GB range is probably what most people need. At that size, they are still pretty expensive.
Eventually I'm sure SSDs will take over, though it make take a new technology (as in something better than Flash) to do it, but it isn't there just yet.
Perhaps Intel should not put all their eggs (hard drives) in one basket (Asia)?
Because Intel has never sold computer technology in the past, so they really have no idea what their sales would likely be. Even though they have 40+years of sales data to correlate this information. Something tells me their speculation is built on much more solid data and algorithms than your analysis is.
"But this one goes to 11!"
So how does this bode for the cloud computing services? Rather than try to buy another external backup drive, I'm now looking more seriously into the cloud for those needs myself.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It doesn't say they 'lost' $1B, it says they lowered their expected revenue by $1B. How do they know the amount and reason? Simple. There are only 3 weeks left in the year. Their sales are not where they expected/wanted them to be - they are $1B lower. They call their largest customers and say 'why are your actual purchases lower than projected' and the customer says 'can't get hard drives, so no need for processors'.
So you expect to pay $45 for a 1TB 2.5" drive instead of the $130 they're going for now?
I know you have probably been told that geeks don't get laid your entire life. It's a lie. If you got out more you would realize that.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I don't know about that, because while Bulldozer wasn't a big hit Bobcat is frankly selling so fast the CEO had them ramp down some of the desktop production to give them more Bobcats, along with ending production of all the Deneb and Thuban chips. I just walked into Walmart today and they were unpacking a pallet load of desktops loaded with e-350s (not bad at $399 with a 20 inch TFT and 500Gb HDD), and looking at their laptops and netbooks I'd say a good 80%+ were E-Series or A-Series. And of course all of the all in ones were E-350 chips. Those Bobcats are selling like hotcakes and as an owner of a EEE E-350 i can see why, its low heat, last 6 hours on a battery, plays full 1080p over HDMI and most importantly doesn't feel like its got a boat anchor tied to it like Atom does.
So this HDD shortage may turn out to be even more of a boost to AMD as by buying the cheaper AMD chips the OEMs can absorb the cost of the higher HDD without raising prices and running off customers. I'm just glad i scored my Thuban when i did because a lot of the Thubans were selling out, my guess everyone that wanted one doing like me and trying to snatch one before they ran out.
So let me leave everybody with my new happy Xmas song! "We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban and a happy six corrrrreeee!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm fairly certain that Intel made the sandforce controllers that almost all SSDs use and they "make" their own line of SSDs as well, though I'm not sure if they're actually a flash chip manufacturer or not. So maybe they should start selling them some SSDs or at least make more money off other people's SSDs with their controllers. I mean seriously, I just built 2 customer computers with 60GB Patriot Pyro drives because after like 5 years, they filled up 3 whole GB of documents. Those things felt faster than my $1000 system with a 1TB Seagate drive. People didn't mind low capacity netbook drives so they could market SSD-based PCs all the way to the bank.
If you hadn't (publicly!) conspired to kill off the netbook then everyone would have been more contempt with smaller SSD's & cloud storage.
(companies HATE keeping stock these days).
Consider the PC component market: products constantly being introduced, replaced, obseleted, along with pretty considerably-paced devaluation; parts that were fairly recently top-of-the-line are now middle-of-the-line. It's no wonder an OEM would want to minimize stock on hand.
Trying to do NTFS recovery from linux has NEVER ended well for me, unless it involved backing data up with ddrescue. Stick with Microsoft's tools, theres a reason so few (if any?) linux tools are capable of dealing with NTFS corruption. Plug the drive into a second computer and do chkdsk /v /f /r on it, in my experience it is VERY unlikely that it will not make things better (if at all possible).
I was in my local CompUSA store over the weekend. Microsoft is offering a $20 rebate on Windows Home if you buy it from Tiger Direct or CompUSA by 12/15/2011. Since I'm in the middle of putting together a new computer I went to pick up a copy. You have to buy some hunk of PC hardware at the same time as the OS if you want the rebate, so I looked at their hard drive selection expecting to not see much because of the 'shortage'. Well they had a TON of Seagate and WD drives in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes. Prices were a bit higher than a year ago, but a 1TB was still $149.95 and I walked out with a 320GB for $99 (might have paid a bit more than half that last year). Maybe buying in bulk would be a problem, but if you need a replacement for an existing computer, or are building a new one there is no shortage as far as I can see. Just a ploy to jack up prices maybe (I know the flooding is for real, but there must have been a lot of product in the pipeline).
You didn't lose $1, you just guessed wrong.
Exactly. I expected to earn a million last year, but I didn't have much work and only managed a mere 3% of my goal. Does that count as operating losses? Perhaps I should also include the $200 million I lost because my lotto ticket didn't hit...
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Oh snap! Score one for the little known but very vocal anti-3D Printing crowd!
There's some rumors that external HDDs may not be the same as internal models, and that they use techniques such as "Shingle Writing" to trade reduced speed for larger storage sizes: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/12/adding_platters/page2.htmlshingle writing
If this is true, you might want to do some testing to make sure your drives perform as expected.
I fail to see how revenues of 13.7 per quarter are a problem.
I have found that crap movies are still crap on my 46" Sony Bravia in a dark room and great movies are still great on my 110" 720p projector setup which I watch on a wall I painted gray a few years ago which has screw holes in some intrusive places.
Oddly enough, the quality of the content is far more interesting to me than the quality of my setup. But, poor H.264 encoding quality is unacceptable at any resolution. This is 2011, even real-time encoding using Intel QuickSync at 5Mbps is pretty damn good quality for 720p. I will admit that video encoded using a long look-ahead on x264 at 9Mbps with proper settings is far superior... but I don't see any real benefits from that to 1080p48 at 50Mbps on BluRay.
Which reminds me... I am planning on using screen paint on the wall for a Christmas gift to myself... I should order that.
On one hand you are right, sales projections aren't guarantees. But if your boss lowers your pay because of lower sales, you are certainly going to feel like you "lost" that money.
Sure do. And that shit was fucking expensive.
Hmm, losing a billion from lost sales kind of makes that point moot now doesn't it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
So, all these components are made "overseas" because it is cheap to make. But often these components are made in areas of political or environmental instability.
I think companies have to start understanding that regardless of how "cheap" it is for the labor to produce the component, if something happens that stops production of those components what is the actual cost to the company to recover? Why are billion dollar companies always so short sited and believe nothing bad will happen to them.
What will the actual cost be to the entire semiconductor industry for the few cents per component saved by building them overseas?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
So, while there is a large percentage of Windows shipped with new computers, also realize that Windows is shipped on computers with SSD as well which will start to be offered at attractive prices compared to ones install with HDD. Also a large portion of Windows sales is coming from upgrading old computers which should offset some of the loss of new computer sales, people may find it attractive to upgrade an older computer rather then buying something brand new while the prices jump.
While Office may be installed on new computers, the bread and butter of Office profit comes from corporate sales to upgrade existing systems,
Microsoft will get a hit for sure, but may not be as big as Intel as they have more paths to market then Intel.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.