Hard drive behind the price of hype: Thai floods are just a fuse

Thailand was hit hard by floods, PC makers won the supply priority, dealers and merchants reluctantly sold goods, and the price of hard drives in retail channels rocketed, and the price of the most representative 500G hard drive doubled.

This seems to be a very easy-to-choice multiple choice question: If you were to replace your house with a hard drive, would you agree? Almost everyone should choose "no". But now, more people hope that this exchange will be real and that their own houses are still large enough.

Previously, because the hard disk industry used extremely liquidity, many first- and second-tier agents chose to mortgage their real estate. In general, the first-tier and second-tier agent's repayment period was between one week and two weeks. However, because the market as a whole is generally performing, it may not be possible for the house to be returned.

But now, these first and second-tier agents will no longer worry about mortgaged houses. With current market conditions, stocks in the hands of the general public can be sold within a week. Those who had previously been exaggerated to describe them as bleak, can now easily make a profit.

Status Quo: Current Hard Disk Quotes "Hardly Seen in a Hundred Years"

This is the best time. Many dealers think so.

The DIY industry has been in a state of gradual decline for the past two years. It has even been claimed by industry insiders that it is about to disappear. One of the three major parts of the hard disk has also been in a thin state. Chen Ran, who works for a brand distributor company, has even turned it into something. “Under normal circumstances, our industry is earning very little, sometimes Even earning only one dollar, two dollars, or even losing a dollar or two dollars."

But everything is completely different. The oversupply hard disk market seems to have reversed supply for less than demand. Previously, because the hard disk industry used extremely liquidity, many first- and second-tier agents chose to mortgage their real estate, and when individual distributors released cargo to primary and secondary agents, they also conducted risk assessments. , and then according to the strength of the first-level and second-tier agents to allocate unequal shares. This means that outsiders will be surprised to "get the house and buy a hard drive." Due to the general performance of the market as a whole, the house that is offset may not be able to come back. Companies like Chen Ran have encountered agents who have failed to get through and run.

But now, these first- and second-tier agents do not have such concerns at all. A second-tier agent, Mr. Chen, said that with the current market conditions, stocks in the hands of the general public can be sold within a week, and some can be released within a few days or even within three days. What is even happier is the distributors who initially stocked the goods in transit or in warehouses after purchasing them at a low price. They can directly transfer their inventory of hard disks at the latest high prices.

"This kind of market can be regarded as rare for centuries." Mr. Chen is very emotional, although the entire history of the hard disk is less than 60 years.

Reason: flood, just opened the price increase prologue According to the US market research company IHS iSuppli released in September of the second quarter of 2011 hard disk market statistics report, in terms of market share, Western Digital occupied 32%, Seagate occupied 31%, Hitachi Global Storage Technology holds a 16% share, Toshiba/Fujitsu holds 11%, and Samsung Electronics takes up 10%. Chen Ran said that in the mainland market, the Western Digital and Seagate are actually occupying the entire market. The remaining brands are almost negligible, especially when Samsung has already been acquired by Seagate, and Western Digital’s acquisition of Hitachi is under review. .

The reason why this relatively stable market has undergone tremendous changes is that the Thai flood that lasted for many months hit hard drive manufacturers with factories in the country. For various reasons, Western Digital had to temporarily shut down the plant to stop production of hard drives. Hitachi’s storage division and Toshiba’s hard drive factory in Thailand were also forced to close. In addition, the production of parts factories including motors, sleds, magnetic head assemblies, and HGA products was also mostly affected, and its assembly line was stopped.

Western Digital confirmed this situation in an announcement issued on October 19 and stated that “In the second quarter of July 1, 2011, Western Digital produced 54 million hard drives in its factories in Thailand and Malaysia, 60 of which % comes from Thai factories, which means there are at least 32,400,000 hard drives. In addition, suppliers of many parts and components related to the hard drive business have more local production bases." But all of this was forced to shut down due to flooding. The factory was affected.

Another giant, Seagate, in a public statement issued by it, also stated that Seagate’s factory in Thailand is operating normally. Although the output is not limited by the supply of internal components or the ability to assemble products, it is affected by the supply of certain external components. As a result, Seagate expects that industry demand will be much larger than supply at least in the second quarter, and the supply breakdown will continue for several quarters. Seagate will also assist external component suppliers to repair the supply chain as soon as possible.

Previously, IHS iSuppli had been too optimistic to predict that due to the impact of the flood in Thailand, the hard disk price in the fourth quarter will increase by 10%. However, in the Mainland market, the real situation is that the price of the most representative 500G hard drive has risen by 100%. As a result, all kinds of conjectures and controversies concerning the shady scene can be seen everywhere.

PC makers hard disk gap: to push up retail prices According to Marx's economics theory, when a commodity appears in short supply, its price will be higher than the value, and the price will change with the degree of shortage of the commodity, the more the shortage of commodity prices, the more High, that is, the greater the degree of deviation from value. From this perspective, the rise in hard drive prices seems justified.

As the general agent of the connection manufacturers and the bottom-level and second-level agents, they are obviously an important part of the price increase chain. Chen Ran said that the employees of the general agent will normally take leave in the eleventh, that is, they will stop shipping within the first week of October, and they will have an extra week of stock by October 7. However, as soon as their National Day holiday ended, after this part of the inventory was issued, the shortage of goods came on the heels of it, accompanied by an increase in hard disk prices.

In fact, generally there will be a price guarantee period of about 20-30 days between the general agent and the manufacturer, that is, during this period of time, the price of the hard disk issued by the manufacturer to the general agent should be stable, even if it fluctuates. Will compensate. However, the loss of production capacity brought by the flood has forced manufacturers to increase the price of hard drives to maintain profitability. After the release of the supply chain warning, the manufacturer stopped the price protection for the general agent and reduced the hard disk supply. As a result, in the last month, the price of distributors directly getting goods from the manufacturers has been constantly increased. When these hard drives are transferred to the first-level and second-level agents, and finally to the shops, the prices have risen again.

But things are obviously not so simple. As hard disk manufacturers, what they value most is not the channel formed by these first- and second-tier agents and end shops, but PC manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, Haier, and Shenzhou. Because the demand of PC manufacturers is the largest and most stable, for example, a certain PC manufacturer can reach 500K (ie, 500,000 units) from the general agency, and of course, it is more likely to get the favor of hard disk manufacturers.

Therefore, after the hard disk capacity is damaged, the manufacturer will certainly choose to meet the needs of PC manufacturers. Even so, according to IHSiSuppli's estimates, PC makers including Dell, Apple, Lenovo, etc. are still mostly faced with hard disk out of stock. From another perspective, under the premise of guaranteeing the hard disk supply of PC manufacturers, the number of hard disks issued to channels is inevitably greatly reduced, which also stimulates the rise of hard disk prices in the retail market. The most typical is the new American egg. The price of 500G Western Digital hard disk was once as high as 109.9 US dollars.

On the other hand, although Western Digital’s share of the global hard disk market is only 32%, in the domestic market this figure should be raised to around 50%. Mr. Chen, a second-tier agent, said that once the Western Digital, which accounts for more than half of the hard disk market, cannot get the goods normally, their choice will naturally be to replace Seagate, Hitachi and other brands. As Seagate stated in its public statement, their products “despite the fact that output is not limited by the supply of internal components or the ability to assemble products, but are affected by the supply of certain external components”, together with the sudden increase in market demand. Large, but also let these brands directly affected by the Thai flood is not too big to join the hard disk of the shortage of goods, price increases.

Against such a background, the familiar army of the Shanzhai failed to emerge as we are familiar with, allowing more “other brands” to enter the market to ease the tide of shortages and prices. According to Chen Ran, this is determined by the characteristics of the hard disk industry. Although the hard disk industry has always been in a blistering situation, it is precisely an industry with high technical requirements. Its core components such as motors, magnetic heads, and other domestic small-scale manufacturers cannot be produced at all, not to mention mobile phones, tablet computers, etc. Products like high-definition players and the like have entered the no-name category.

Similarly, when the hard disk market was completely out of stock, it was originally a low-profile SSD that “grabbed the team to seize power” and occupied an excellent opportunity for ordinary hard disk market share. Unfortunately, SSD manufacturers have not been able to reduce prices in a timely manner to attract the attention of more ordinary consumers.

Because fierce speculation so fierce more people are willing to believe that hard disk gains so ferocious, it should not simply because the market is out of stock. It should be noted that, for a long period of time before October, the demand for the hard disk market has been very sluggish. Therefore, major brands have at least 7 days of inventory in many shops.

In fact, when the rally began to take off, there have been savvy agents and merchants who have started to consciously sell their goods. Wang Kai is an ordinary distributor of SEG Plaza. He told the reporter that his former family—a second-tier agent had picked up a lot of hard drives. Just a week or so later, watching the hard disk price soared from around 260 yuan to 500 yuan. Now, when consumers come to inquire about 500G hard drive quotes, Wang Kai directly gives a price of 600 yuan. In fact, he does not have much hard disk on his hands. Similarly, more agents and distributors have a common wait-and-see mood in the face of rising hard drives: Waiting for the first time, hard drives can rise even higher.

Chen Ran told reporters that the monthly traffic of a single-brand hard drive at a general agent is around 20K. Then according to Wang Kai's estimation, some powerful first- and second-tier agents can only earn 1K and wait until the hard disk gains reach 200 yuan before he can easily earn 200,000. In fact, such an estimate is still conservative.

Similar to the previous “Garlic Yours” and “Beans You Play”, except for the intentional operation of people in the hard disk circle, the smell-sensitive memory and CPU vendors will also invest some money in the hard disk market after knowing that Thailand was flooding. Both Chen Ran and Wang Kai spoke of a near-joke fact: Many times in a computer city, the hard disk actually did not really sell to the consumer how much, but only moved from one store to another, and each move rose. The price is 20 yuan. In the end, unexpectedly, the strange spectacle with the same specifications of bare disks is even more expensive than the price of mobile hard disks with shells.

There are also suspects in the speculation of the original network operators with low prices. What is intriguing is that when the hard disk starts gaining momentum, when consumers go to these B2C websites, they are surprised to find that they are almost out of stock. Subsequently, just a few days later, various network operators began to resume normal supply, but the strange thing is that the price is almost neat and unified, straight line soared. Up to now, the most typical Western Digital 500G blue disk is still the unified price of 599 yuan in various network operators, all of which obviously can not be just explained with just. After seeing the B2C website increasing prices, retail shopkeepers also joined the ranks of rising prices. As a result, the hard disk market has only grown up loud, both online and offline.

Question: Who is paying for price increases?

This is the worst time. As the last link in the hard disk market chain, if not unexpected, all the upward pressure will ultimately be borne by consumers. But whether it is a business owner or a consumer himself, it should be understood that consumers' rigid demand for hard drives is far less than what the market needs.

Chen Ran’s forecast for the final performance of the retail market is actually quite optimistic. In his view, as an indispensable component of DIY, the hard disk is not just an isolated hard disk; without it, other components such as CPU, memory, and graphics cards obviously cannot be sold. Therefore, when the increase in hard disk prices forces consumers to reduce their purchasing desires, DIY merchants can only choose to allow CPU, memory, graphics cards and other components to link prices with the hard disk, in order to ease the pressure on hard drive prices. In Huaqiangbei, many merchants have already launched special DIY packages including CPU, memory, hard disks, and motherboards. The price of Western Digital's 500G hard drive is about 480 yuan.

The top-level and second-tier agents are obviously no need to worry about sales. In addition to the fact that dealers have been very active in eating hard disk inventory, they have another road --- exports. Compared to domestic agents and distributors, there has been no practice of picking goods abroad, so it is obviously a good way for agents to sell hard stock to overseas markets. In fact, hard disk circles are widely circulated rumors that recent Taiwanese and Japanese businessmen have swept their hard drives in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Wang Kai, who directly faces consumers in the retail market, has become less optimistic. In his view, due to the 100% increase in the price of hard drives, the demand for hard drives by consumers is actually only one to two percent of that before October. The rigid demand generated around ordinary hard drives has been relatively fragile. After all, consumers can give up DIY and instead buy branded desktops. Because of this, even if the hard disk itself, its gains are almost all concentrated in the 3.5-inch market.

Afternoon: Acquiring Hitachi to Accelerate Recovery Key For the recovery of HDD production lines, only IHSiSuppli's different analysts gave various forecasts. The most recent one is said to be recovered in December, and the latest is claimed to last several quarters. However, Chen Ran’s general agent company estimates that even after Thailand’s flood waters receded, the plant’s various production environments and production equipment were restored, overtime was added to produce hard disks, and the basic supply of hard disks was normal. It should be until next year. 6 month.

One of the key points is that hard disk production requires high production environment and production equipment, because the internal hard disk is required to achieve a dust-free, vacuum state. It is still unknown whether these devices affected by floods can meet these requirements. First of all, it will obviously take a certain amount of time for the production equipment to return to production requirements. Furthermore, if the worst happens, the factory needs to replace a batch of new equipment for production. Then it will take more time to wait until the new equipment is fully operational and restart production.

The variable does not exist. Western Digital made a bid for Hitachi in the first half of this year, but the EU has been reviewing its possible high monopoly and failed to release the acquisition. Then, when Western Digital’s production capacity is hit so hard, the EU’s attitude towards this acquisition may be changed. Once the acquisition is successful, Western Digital can directly mobilize production bases such as Hitachi Global Storage Center in Shenzhen to allow Western Digital's hard disk production capacity to recover as soon as possible.

Hard Drive Market Sales Roadmap A second-tier agent has picked up a number of hard drives. Just a week or so later, watching the hard disk price soared from around 260 yuan to 500 yuan. Now, when consumers come to inquire about quotes for 500G hard drives, the direct price is 600 yuan.

Insiders told reporters that the general single-brand hard drive in a general agent's monthly flow is about 20K. According to a conservative estimate, some powerful first- and second-tier agents can easily earn 200,000 yuan even if they only take 1K and wait until the hard disk gains reach 200 yuan.

As hard disk manufacturers, they value the most are PC manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, Haier, Shenzhou and so on. Because PC makers demand is the largest and most stable. Therefore, after the hard drive's capacity is damaged, manufacturers will certainly choose to meet the needs of PC manufacturers, so the number of hard drives issued to the channel is inevitably greatly reduced, which also stimulated the rise in hard disk prices in the retail market.