The earthquake disaster proved to have some fairly ironic consequences

Oct 14, 2011 13:39 GMT  ·  By

One wouldn't expect a natural disaster to have many effects that would be considered positive, but it looks like the IT industry managed it with the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March.

IHS iSuppli did what it does for a living, namely look at one of the IT industry's segment and try to make heads or Tails of it.

In this case, it is the storage market that fell under its scrutiny, though the results of the study may not be what some expect.

Going by all the sales problems, and lowering PC orders and such, one would expect a drop in sales or some such.

It turns out, however, that sales actually went up, provided one looks at HDDs, ODDs and SSDs put together.

Oddly enough, the disaster of March (2011), in Japan, caused a sort of panic among manufacturers, who felt they had to stockpile on products in order to avoid shortages later on.

Thus, the combined shipments of hard disk drives, optical disk drives and solid state drives were of 248.8 million units.

In other words, the shipment levels rose by 4.5% (the previous quarter had yielded 238.1 million units).

“In an ironic twist, the earthquake disaster in Japan had the effect of stimulating the storage market, as manufacturers accelerated orders and increased inventory to ensure adequate supply,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS.

“The effect was felt most in the HDD space, the largest storage segment, resulting in higher HDD shipments.”

The fourth quarter might not go through such a stellar process, though, at least as far as HDDs are concerned.

The floods in Thailand caused major disruptions to Western Digital's activities and might affect Seagate as well.

Also, the incoming holiday season doesn't seem to be enough for IT players to risk ordering or building too much, so it isn't likely that shipments will keep growing.