Hitachi executives: hard drive price return to wait until the end of 2012

In Thailand, one of the world's factories, a rare flood occurred in mid-2011, and in addition to the lives of the local people, the hardest hit was the global hard disk industry. In October, when inventory was gradually reduced and production capacity was difficult to recover, channel prices for many hard drives even rose by 100%. This is not good news for any user. Even now, the channel retail price of most hard drives is still 50% higher than before the flood in Thailand. In view of this situation, Hitachi executives predict that the impact of flooding in Thailand on the hard disk industry chain will continue until the end of the year.

Brendan Collins, vice president of Hitachi Global Storage Products, recently commented that it will take another year for the global hard drive industry to fully recover from the impact of flooding in Thailand. Therefore, it is not until 2012 that the company can fully resume normal supply.

Brendan Collins said that after the floods, Hitachi has been actively restoring production at Thai factories, and production capacity will return to normal levels by the end of February. However, due to the shortage of relevant upstream components, the overall inventory at the end of the first quarter will be almost zero.

In order to avoid repeating the mistakes, there are already some hard disk-related manufacturers considering dispersal capacity, and others are planning to move the factory to higher altitudes, just as Seagate and Hitachi now do.

There have been recent rumors that Seagate is asking its downstream brand supplier customers to sign a full-year supply contract to capture market share from Western Digital. Brendan Collins responded by saying that Hitachi’s Hitachi would not do so.

He also pointed out that in the past few months, hard disk retail channel prices have generally risen by at least 50%, and as hard disk manufacturers' capacity gradually recovers, prices will fall back.