"Thailand’s economy unexpectedly expanded in the first quarter as factories resumed production and domestic consumption revived after last year’s floods. The baht rose.
Gross domestic product increased 0.3 percent in the three months through March from a year earlier, after contracting a revised 8.9 percent in the previous quarter, the National Economic and Social Development Board said in Bangkok today. The median of 18 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey was for a 0.5 percent decline."
Glad to hear that Thailand is recovering so quickly! That's great news. Q1 was a strong quarter.
I suppose the disruption must have dissipated.
But that begs the question - if Thailand is shipping, does this mean that hard drive manufacturers were, in fact, shipping in Q1?
"Seagate's third quarter results reflect strong operating performance by the company against the backdrop of a continued recovery of the hard drive industry."
"We increased our unit shipments by 29% over last quarter, shipping 61 million drives, which equates to approximately 42 exabytes. Shipments of our client products improved, with the notebook market almost fully recovered, as expected. We expect the market for desktop drives to remain constrained, most likely through the fall. In the enterprise, the mission-critical market segment market seems to have almost fully recovered, while business-critical continues to be constrained as demand for storage continues to increase rapidly with the ongoing build out of the cloud infrastructure."
http://seekingalpha.com/article/505291-seagate-technology-plc-s-ceo-discusses-q3-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript
Looked and looked and couldn't find any mention of the floods in Thailand. It's gone off the radar at Seagate.
Is it really possible that the effect of the Thai floods moved so slowly through the supply chain that it is only now affecting Seagate's customers?
Obviously not a company like Dell, which is famous for the low level of its inventory. Its demand pull structure is pulling hard drive demand straight through from its suppliers.
Funny how these things work.
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