HDD Crisis Was Fake: Seagate and Western Digital Post Big Profits

Please lower the price !!!

Ouch! You send "please" on the cartel! Received this message but it is was created automatically! With Your "please" will be made next speculation of prices;)

Constantin Murariu
Nice work man.
Yes hdd crisis was fake and in my view they will never decrease the price up-to one year. May be after one or two years they decrease the price.

The so called 'Crisis' started somewhere around October 2011 and its close to 9 months now. I doubt if they are ever going to decrease prices

Ever lower prices on SSD mean your old spinner is going to be cheaper, and then gone, one fine day...

That's why the divisions are sold in the first place.

of course , and this kind of news never reach the main stream media and none care or realize this was all a scam.the same will happen with the memories. i will not buy another hard disk till go low as at least 5% more expensive of the original price. thanks for expose this things Constantin Murariu

Ok, have you tried ordering enterprise hard drives lately? There is a shortage. Yes, prices on all drives got inflated and workstation grade drives are pretty easy to find. Try to get SAS drives and you're out of luck.

Thanks for basing your facts on how you can walk into Best Buy or Fry's and see some on the shelf that have probably been in their warehouse for 8 months.

Crisis was real, price response was not real.

The flood was real. There was no crisis because the HDD's still kept coming all the way. Price response was risky, tho good. Since if the customer is happy (= Seagate sells more than it used to) then why not charge as much money as possible? It's business and its for money for gods sake.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning in this article. First of all, while the average consumer hasn't had issues finding hard drives, businesses definitely have. Large orders and orders for certain enterprise level drives were greatly delayed.

Second, the whole idea behind raising the price is so that they don't run out. Pretty basic concept of supply and demand.

Finally, why would they loose money? Seagate's manufacturing plants weren't even among those damaged, so of course their going to be selling more drives.

WD suffered damage from the Thailand flooding. Seagate did not.

GREEDY BASTARDS

Idiots, it doesn't make any sense to fake a crisis to increase prizes in a free market! Heard of supply and demand? If people buy the products the prize is per definition not to high. It's not like people MUST have harddrives to survive, it is not a human right lol.

what are you talking about, not a human right? Where are we gonna keep all our opinions, articles, research and personal data? Not on an ssd of any sort. much too small and too slow. Human rights support technology. It doesn't exclude it. That means we have the right to a pc and free flowing internet, without data caps and overinflated priceing,. without undue censorship or malicious attempts to hide or misguide the truth. facts or alter reality from what it was or is. Music, movies and data submitted to the internet....are all there to be shared openly in their original form with credit provided as such. Shareing is not piracy. Don't want it shared freely...don't put it on a pc connected to the internet, and certainly don't upload it anywhere. Copying anothers work and making it seem as though another created it originally is however a copyright infringement. And rightfully should be prosecuted as such. And nothing more...

oil companies do it all the time. Don't let a "natural" disaster go to waste...exploit it fully. Grab people by their feet and shake...if nothing falls out...arrest them. And put them to work on an oil rig/field.

I've been thinking along these lines for awhile. Problem is that SSD prices have been going down and their capacity has been going up...so if the HDD makers don't get off their high horse, they're going to have to start dumping old inventory because by now we should be seeing 5 TB drives for $120 and nobody will want the 2 TB ones for $175.

This is complete * and utter sensationalism. You should be ashamed of yourself as a "journalist." 25% of the worlds slider supply (a key hdd component) was underwater for months. Seagate didn't get its sliders from this source and weren't impacted as much as WD.

I will not be purchasing another HDD till the prices fall to what they were... and I do need several terabytes worth, but wait I will.

Western Digital lost 60% of their manufacturing capabilities and $1 billion in revenue due to the floods. Seagate's supplies were constrained and demand didn't slow (and still hasn't).

Seagate has been the benefactor of the floods but their prices rose in response to constraints in the entire supply chain. WD is still in the red from the floods and to say that the whole thing was a profit move is a little ridiculous.

the prices have come back down to almost exactly what they were 1 year ago....

As with many things originating in Asia, another fake.
I was about to make an investment of nearly 100k of bare drives just before the crisis and that has now been postponed indefinitely, as I'm certainly not paying "hostage" prices.
Will we ever see prices drop? Who knows. Grudgingly, perhaps. Eventually. I'm no longer holding my breath, or rather, I'm now waiting for SSD.

Working for the largest solution provider in Australia I can confirm 100% that IBM, HP & Dell all suffered critical shortages on HDDs duringthe blackout.
Distribution agents in Australia had little to no stock of all enterprise level SATA HDDS (1TB,2TB & 3TB) for several months.

All the stock that would normally be allocated for Australia was shipped to the US and UK instead.

I would not be at all surprised if those figures showing that Seagate shipped +2% was specific to one country, due to it taking stock from other countries.

We did pay a lot more and no one is happy about that, however to avoid critical stock drops Seagate, WD & Hitachi had to increase their prices and of course, like any smart business, turned a disaster in to a major profit for them.
I am not happy about that and I do not support a business turning a disaster in to a profit but they did what they had to do to stop their shares from crashing. Smart business.

And who is to tell that WD and SG didn't withhold drives from distributors on purpose so they could inflate the price by creating demand with false "shortage"? They can just decide not to sell 100% of SAS drive production and only sell 20% and stockpile the rest until demand reaches the point at which they can raise prices by 200%. Dell and HP just suffer like the rest, they want to buy, WD doesnt want to sell under excuse that they don't have. So instead of selling 100 units for 1000$, they sell them 20 units for 500$. It's good business.

Server hard drives were completely out of stock during that time frame. All major distribution channels were completely dried up for at least a solid month. My business was hurt because we had server orders that couldn't be filled. The crisis was very real. That said, I'm sure the companies use the crisis to their advantage.

Figures it was something like this. Now I am expecting ram manufacturers to do the same thing.

I wont purchase this * segate HDD untill they give 3 years warranty or reduce the price , I like to buy WD HDD

Since there's only 2 real players. Who knows they could be price rigging.
Too bad SSD's aren't further along.

I thought WD seagate, samsung and hitachi...were all owned by seagate in some form...you can buy all these from seagate directly.

Also, IF there were already enough HDD's to supply every citizen who owned a pc x4...In stock... Who bought up all the HDD's?? If you've been following gold,silver,copper etc. It also suggests a huge electrical project. But by whom? And where? consumers aren't demanding this or buying it...who is?? china??

Wait till China will release their HDDs...

Well Said my man.

they must be get very high profit after this case, PLEASE LOWER UR PRICE DAFUQ

greedy bastards!

Fear-mongering worked for the Nazis during the WW2, its working for the US currently, certainly works for Fox news. There's huge profit in it. It's not going to stop, only accelerate. Its the new business model.

I'm really confused about where the number in the article referred to as WD's $146 million in net income came from. According to WD's latest SEC filing (an 8-K), the number $146 million only appears in reference to April 2011 net income, which was before the flooding, and also happens to be negative after taking depreciation and taxes into account. Why didn't the article use the more recent March 2012 net income? At any rate, it doesn't really look like we'll know the full picture financially until WD files its annual 10-K covering the periods where the flood actually had an effect.

Doesn't this violate U.S. Anti-Trust laws?

One would think so, but really, hard drives are hard drives, so as far as consumers are concerned, two big companies (WD and Seagate) is enough competition in a market where products can only be so different.
As for the SAS/enterprise market for HDD, that's a whole different story in itself.

This article is a fake. WD and Seagate financial results for Q4/11 clearly show a dent in shipments and profits. Just the fact that they are recovering now does not mean the manufacturing issues were fake.

Please give me those 2,5 billion dollars worth of Seagate shares they're buying now and those 700 million dollars worth of dividends WD is paying their shareholders this month and I'll let them keep the 4.2 billion dollars they've paid for Hitachi and Samsung's HDD factories. :)

@Constatin Murari
Only by increasing it's prices has Western Digital manged to stay afloat, and the fact that WD was able to give the money they did to their shareholders is only a testimony of how good of a company they are under hot water, not proof that the manufacturing plant that was INDEED flooded on that terrible day, not flooded at all.

(For extra points, spot the two puns in the above paragraph)

You should really read this :

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fake-HDD-Crisis-Confirmed-WD-Spends-Another-1-9-Billion-USD-271159.shtml

The thing is that there is no way they could spend 7 billion dollars in CASH if they would have been so badly hit.

Besides, the crisis is FAKE not the floods.

The floods were real, but both Seagate in WD had huge stocks, enough to last them a whole year, but they've increased the prices anyway, using the flood as a pretext.

Sounds like the Chip crisis of 1999... completely fabricated BS to increase profit margins at least on a temporary level. Vote with your wallet! Find another vendor, pay a little more, and teach these companies a lesson!

Aha. This is good news. Now we just need to stop buying their crap to show how bad it is to lie.

Duopoly ? There's still Toshiba in town, and they could play a card. (So yeah, it's a triopoly, not much better, but it's worse in the CPU business…)

Also, the shortage *was* real. Did they maximize the throughput in order to satisfy everyone as soon as possible ? That's not sure.

Yep, I agree. Everyone is forgetting Toshiba :-(
It is a Triopoly... but who's counting.
On the other hand, Toshiba have a monopoly now on the 1.8" HDD after Samsung pulled out a couple of years ago.
At this point in time, I can not comment on quality of HDD compared to SSD for long term use, except that if you disconnect a HDD and reconnect it after a couple of years, you still have your data (if no mechanical problem), but for a SSD, try leaving it unpowered... NO DATA after a very long time. You need to occassionaly connect power to them to retain their information.
Now, all sing along, it is not two companies, but three, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital that make HDD today and have their own Fab's.

Wow one of the biggest BS articles I've ever seen. Look at WD profits. Look at Seagates profits. See a difference? Seagate wasn't affected by the floods, so of course they're going to take advantage of the prices. They'd be ludicrous not to.

Im not sure how that is faked ... Where thenplants flooded or not?

Flood - real.

Crisis / Shortage - Fake / Artificial .. just to make it appear they don't have overstock from before the floods and triple the prices.

If they would have been selling each drive right from the factory door, do you think the price for a 1 TB drive would have fallen to 50$ last year ?

The prices fell because there was overproduction and profit margins were dismal.
When the floods hit, they had stocks to last well after the repowering of the factories.

Samsung HDD are verrrrrrrry incomparable with other 2, they are simply weak. I gave up after 2, 1TB SpinPoint and 250GB, my bro looose also one 500GB, so we never ever more buy next Samsung. You buy Samsung if is problem you loose data, they give you next one and circle is close, again and again... But who give you back your data, unique photos of your family, friends etc. This are stills of your life just lost. My Seagate 250GB works good and I hope it will be like that. Think twice before buying Samsung HDD. Here in Poland we called it s...sung.

Fortunately for me and my friends, we were happy with our F3 drives.

After Seagate shipped this winter and spring ALL the drives they were manufacturing with no quality check, we started to call them something similar :)

Every day when buying close to 100 HDDs from Seagate we had at least 5 or 6 DOA and, in the first two or three weeks after shipping the server, we usually got other returned drives from our customers.

I think that the overall failure rate was around 10 or 12 percent this winter. Seagate tripled the prices and shipped every drive they were manufacturing with no regard for their customers.
Or, at least, that’s the impression the situation left on us.

Intel, Micron and Samsung with they SSDs will crush this industry with two to five years.

don't think if they're ever gonna do anything as long as there's no antitrust investigation happening

QUIT MILKIN IT ALREADY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
just another d-bag nickel n diming their customers

isnt price fixing illegal ????????????

It sounds like like the petrol crisis... the price never goes back down after... lol

Capitalism

Im glad I purchased my HDD right before the floods when I got 1TB for 45$ on amazon. Then that HDD died 8 months later and I was forced to pay 6$ to ship it to western digital where they originally claimed they would pay most of the shipping due to a "partnership" with UPS... Either way 51$ overall is nothing compared to 90-95$ for the same unreliable western digital green drive today. In the end they sent me a refurbished 1TB Western digital blue with 32mb cache (note my green drive had a 64mb cache if it really makes a difference)

This is possibly the worst case of sensationalism that I have read outside of the political arena.

Can somebdy plz help to find a good 1 TB External HDD?? Toshiba, Seagate(China made) or WD (Thailand) ?? This enquiry is from UAE..