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NetApp, Lenovo Raise Prices, Citing Thailand Flooding Effects
Lucas123 writes "First HP, then EMC, and now NetApp has hiked up the price of its hard disk drives by 5% to 15%. The vendors sent letters to users stating that the flooding in Thailand had caused major component shortages, and while they tried to absorb the supplier price increases, each had to eventually give in. Lenovo also announced it has run out of certain drives for its PC systems including some popular 7,200rpm models."
Are they seriously saying there are NO other plants in the world to take up the slack? The entire industry put ALL their eggs in one basket?
Has no one ever heard of having multiple supply chains before?
What the hell is management doing?
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Imagine a world where we require those we benefit from to be treated equally regardless of their place of residence.
Imagine that a business employing or contracting out to foreign states must ensure that the workers he exploits receive the same protections as if he were employing directly in the country to which he sells.
Imagine that, rather than receiving tax breaks for offshoring, we ensure that the tax burden of an offshorer can be no lower than someone choosing local employees.
In short, imagine a level playing field rather than the monstrosity of abuse produced by the WTO.
Prices wouldn't be much higher for the end consumer - we'd perhaps return to more reliable machines with a higher initial cost which are used for longer, but that's only a positive. But profits would be lower.
At this point I suspect it would be more cost-effective for the rest of the world to pay a one-time contribute to relocate the entirety of Thailand somewhere less affected by natural disasters.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
All the consumer hard drive retailers (e.g. Newegg, microcenter, anywhere) hiked hard drive prices by 200-400% months ago as a response to the floods. I know the big name storage vendors spend less on spinning media and more on, well, overhead and profits, but they come out looking like good guys if they only hiked their prices 5 to 15 percent.
would it really be that hard to build a key hard drive component manufacturing facility on, oh, you know, not a floodplain?
What cost me $70 now runs $180 on Newegg. There's no way in hell I'm buying anything until the prices become MUCH more reasonable. I'm not asking for a drop to the original price right away, but goddamn. Make the prices a bit more sane and I *might* be tempted to spend a little tax money on a drive or two. At least I have a spare 1.5tb sitting around for emergencies.
I have a suspicion that like the airlines baggage fees, they'll keep prices this high even after the issues are resolved since consumers will be used to them at that point.
Not to downplay the real loss of life and property, but the supplier might use this as an opportunity for the future.
They started having HDs on sale recently, even a new 2TB for $139.99 the other day. All prices are gradually drifting downwards.
All the companies mentioned in this article with the exception of Lenovo, are all U.S. companies. Does building factories in the U.S. seem so laughable nowadays that such an idea is not even entertained? I did some research and it seems that the average wage for skilled labor is about $163/month in Thailand. How bad would the U.S. economy have to get before those kind of wages become acceptable here?
Seriously, have you seen what EMC and Netapp charge for drives? They could afford a temporary price in drives without passing anything along to their customers and still make a tidy profit. Pardon me if I don't shed a tear for this temporary uptick in their materials cost.
I purchased a Lenovo W520 a couple of weeks ago, and there simply was no 7200rpm choice, it was 5400rpm or SSD. (and the 5400rpm was the same price as what the 7200 one would have been).
So I had to purcharse a SSD instead, which was significantly more expensive.
It's all a ploy to get us to spend more money.
The reason they avoided a cost uptick so long is because they spend a lot of money to stockpile replacement parts that *usually* will never be sold or shipped and thus had a huge stockpile. You are paying for that continuity being guaranteed throughout your usually lengthy warranty.
If you don't *need* that continuity then don't buy their components. Functionality wise you can get by without those vendors by using much cheaper alternatives and it may very well be more appropriate in your case (if you have enough skills, attention, and infrastructure to mitigate the risk in other ways, or the risk just isn't significant in your application). Some endeavors are exceptionally paranoid and once in a blue moon an innocuous difference in a new model somehow significantly breaks the system it is a part of (of the few times I can think of, usually poor in-house software hardcoded to awkward specific cases is to blame here). In any event I'd never buy from one of the enterprise vendors for my house, but for some things at work I do think an enterprise vendor is important even with their insane markup.
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Hurry the fuck up and stream pics too.
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they sell rebranded 1TB drives for 1K USD seams they could afford to absorb $20
At this point I believe it's outright gouging.
Fine, they can keep raising the prices, a lot of my customers end up buying a new computer now instead of repairing, sucks for me (but I personally make more money through other types of repairs than disk failures) and when I upgrade my system, I will reuse my old terabyte drives that have been sitting around and some older 250s with backup, with and SSD as the main drive.
All they're doing is making SSDs look more attractive. I mean, I can get a 120 GB SSD for almost the same price as a 160 GB HDD now (when they're on sale, and I suspect there will be more "Sales" of SSDs in the near future, until their real price reflects the sale prices, just like hard drives did.
You do have to wonder, Thailand does have some higher places that would have been a better choice to build a factory, why did they choose areas that are prone to flooding for 25% of their production?
One part of me would like to attribute greed and stupidity (hey we can cut costs if we build here!)
but for a company that is well aware of the sensitivity of building these things, and building electronics in general, and likely had a site survey AND discussed the risks of building there, (No, I do not refer to the HDD makers, the companies affected are the companies that make the motors) they likely considered the fact the factory sits in a flood plain as a bonus, because now they can profit heavily. Not only will they make so much profit that they could rebuild more plants, but they will make more than they previously did thanks to a natural disaster.
I'm inclined to think this was intentional.
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