14 DAY TRIAL // Those who learned of the severe floods that hit Thailand will have deduced that the consequences are going to be quite widespread, and Western Digital is, apparently, feeling them already.
People may have read about how severe floods hit Thailand, affecting or outright destroying the lives of millions of people.
Predictably, the disaster was indiscriminate, affecting everything that was unfortunate enough to lie in its path.
This includes whatever factories and businesses happened to be in the area, as Western Digital had to admit.
According to its press release, the current leader of the hard disk drive market had to completely shut down its HDD facilities there.
Some factories were inundated, as were some employee homes, and transportations and utilities in the region aren't faring any better either.
WD now has to figure out how to most rapidly repair whatever damage was caused and how to assist its workers.
All things considered, this isn't something that Western Digital can easily gloss over, not with how its Thailand plants accounted for over 60% of its total HDD output in the May-July period.
That would be roughly 32 million drives, not a small amount by any measure.
Western Digital can't carry out a full impact assessment yet, as the flooding hasn't come to a conclusion so far.
The fact that this goes for all the people and authorities involved doesn't speak well for the near future.
Hopefully, closed off factories will be the least of Thailand's problems, however, as the disaster in Japan earlier in the year (earthquake and tsunami both), made worse by the nuclear meltdown, brought enough death and destruction already.
After all, if these things keep happening, it won't be long before people outright stop caring about rising IT product prices (and there will be fewer people left to buy them, as bitterly ironic as it sounds). So far, at least, there has been no indication that WD drives were getting pricier.