HP Says HDD Makers Don't Know When They'll Be at 100% Again

Having decided to stay in the PC market, HP is subject to the same issues as all others of this cohort, namely component shortages, more precisely the troubles on the HDD market.

Hard disk drives used to be runner ups for our recommendation on what to buy this Christmas, but then they went short.

The flooding in Thailand effectively crippled the segment by shutting down multiple factories of HDD or HDD components.

Updates on the situation are made every week, several times even, but, so far, nothing very promising was said about it.

HP has now made its contribution, one that is no more optimistic than the others.

"I have been on the phone with the heads of all four of our disk drive partners. I am not even sure they have a complete picture about when they are going to be back up and running," said Meg Whitman, chief executive officer of HP, during the conference call with financial analysts.

"I think this is going to affect the industry pretty dramatically because it is PCs, it is servers, it is storage. I think there is going to be some shortages in Q1 and Q2. I think we're as well positioned as we can be, but I think this is going to be pretty tough for the industry."

HP mirrored Dell and set up a special crisis team that pulled inventories and started buying higher HDD inventories as early as October.

Right now, the company is supposed to be well equipped with a solid supply of HDDs, since HP has long-term relationships to fall back on, not just speed of reaction.

This doesn't change the prospects of HDD shortages lasting through the whole first half of 2012 though.

"We reacted really fast to this. We set up a war room. We began pulling in inventory and made strategic buys of hard drives back in early October. So I think we will get more than our fair share of drives here because of the long-term relationships that we have with our suppliers because we were on this really fast," stated Mrs. Whitman.