Jack-O-Bytes Reviews: Flooding

Saturday, 29 October 2011

AMD Does Not Expect Thai Flood to Reduce Demand Towards Its Chips

Advanced Micro Devices does not expect potential shortage of hard disk drives caused by flooding in Thailand to affect its business performance in the fourth quarter. The company projects that existing inventory of hard drives to be enough for Q4 2011 and is more concerned about its own supply problems conditioned by poor yields of 32nm chips at Globalfoundries.

"We do not see an impact in the fourth quarter, to be very honest, at least after discussing with our customers. We will have to see how this is going to impact the supply chain moving forward and into 2012. It depends on a lot of things, how long this situation is going to continue, and then how much damage needs to be repaired. But in short term, not much of an impact," said Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer of Advanced Micro Devices, during a conference call with financial analysts.

Due to flooding in Thailand, largest maker of hard drives Western Digital had to close its HDD manufacturing facilities down, while Seagate Technology suffers tight supply of components, which also reduces its output. In case there is a shortage of drives, PC makers will be unable to sell computers and will thus cut orders for microprocessors. Independent analysts believe that there will be enough hard drives for Q4 2011.

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Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Apple, Dell, Intel Expect HDD Shortage to Have Drastic Impact on PC Market.

Although the high-tech market tends to recover quickly from almost all kinds of disasters and large manufacturers often try to reduce their risks, the flooding in Thailand and consequent potential shortage of hard disk drives will clearly affect the whole PC industry in the coming quarters. But while giants like Apple, Dell or Intel are concerned, they remain relatively optimistic.

Intel, the world's largest supplier of microprocessors on the planet, said on Friday that it was keeping an eye on a dynamic situation in Thailand that directly impacts that hard drive supplies, but expects existing stores of drives and unaffected sources to help keep the PC industry supplied.

"The PC supply chain has proven to be very resilient, as most recently demonstrated in the response to the earthquake in Japan," said Jon Carvill, a spokesman for Intel, reports Reuters news-agency.