Thai flood hits computer market in state

The floods in Thailand has led to steep increase in price of the computer hard disc drives (HDD), an important peripheral, by 150 per cent.

Thailand, one of the major exporters of hard disk in the world, caters major chunk of its production to the South East Asia and is a production base for two of the well-known brands of HDDs namely Seagate and Western Digital (WD) besides others like HITACHI and Samsung.

“The price of HDDs has surged by 150 per cent within twenty days following the dearth of supply from Thailand which is inundated by flood since July. A 500 Giga Byte hard disk of Seagate company, which had the price tag of Rs 1,800 a month ago, now costs about Rs 4,200 in the local market and same is the case with other brands,” said Prasanta Kumar Swain, Chairman, Niagama Comptech and Services (Pvt) limited, a city based dealer.

He said, the SEGAT brand enjoys 70 percent of the market share, while WD and Hitachi shares 20 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.

The assembled computer market is down by 50 per cent between October and November compared to same period of the last year due to this exorbitant price rise, he added.

Adding to the woes of the retail suppliers, the distributors in the state are holding on to the stock to sell it for higher prices, alleged Swain, who is also a member of IT Association of Orissa (ITAO), an organization representing IT and hardware firms in the state.

“Outlets in the city are facing problems to sell their products as there is scarcity of HDDs due to flood in Thailand. The HDDs are sold at 120 per higher than the regular price and the sales of the assembled PC market have also descended by 50 per cent compared to the last year,” said Sunil Jaiswal, Managing Director, Infocare Solution Pvt ltd.

He said, “We are urging the buyers to switch to branded products like Lenovo, Dell, HP, the prices of which are likely to go up shortly due to the current market situation. We are expecting the fluctuations in price of the peripherals will continue till February,” Jaiswal added.

It may be noted that three months of heavy rain have affected about a third of Thailand, destroying farmland and killing more than 300 people.