Almost 4 Million Fewer PCs Will Sell in Q1, 2012

The latest in predictions about the Thailand floods has been made, and this one is a fairly bleak forecast regarding the personal computer market.

There will be much lower PC sales in the first three months of next year because of hard disk drive shortage.

Had there not been any floods in Thailand to shut down HDD and HDD component factories, there would have been no such problem.

Alas, misfortune struck and the storage drive shortage is proving to be quite serious.

Thus, since the majority of PCs use the platter spinners, they, too, will be unable to reach the levels of shipments they would otherwise have.

Not that there is anything new to this. After all, that HDDs and everything relying on them would go through harsh times was stated again and again over the past month.

Now, though, IHS iSuppli provided an actual estimate of by how much the PC sales would be crippled.

The figure is of 3.8 million for the first quarter of 2012 (the January-March period), as the predicted 88 million shipments for Q1 have been revised to 84.2 million

“The PC supply chain says it has sufficient HDD inventory for the fourth quarter of 2011. However, those stockpiles will run out in the first quarter of 2012, impacting PC production during that period,” said Matthew Wilkins, senior principal analyst of compute platforms at IHS.

The global growth of the PC market will drop from 9.5% to 6.8% next year as, instead of 399 million, only 374 million computers are set to be shipped.

Western Digital (the greatest supplier of HDDs) and Nidec (the main maker of HDD motors and other components) were the most severely hit, hence the consequences.

The companies are both supposedly recovering as fast as possible, but the damage has already been done.