14 DAY TRIAL // The earthquake and tsunamis in Japan definitely took the world itself by surprise, and not in a good way considering the cost of human lives, but it seems not all those that could have been affected suffered that badly.
The natural disaster that struck Japan last week will definitely go down in history as one of the most serious of recent times.
The earthquake and tsunamis not only took the lives of many people, but also caused fires at an oil refinery and damaged a nuclear power plant, where the risk of meltdown is rather high.
All in all, human casualties are expected to number over 10,000, partially because many people were left stranded and without food or water.
Needless to say, the IT industry will have some consequences of its own to sort out, like a possible shortage of 12-inch wafers, among other things.
There are, however, those companies that won't be affected that seriously, Acer being one of them, or so says a recent report.
Acer's suppliers in Japan account for only a very small part of its LCD panels, optical disk drives (ODDs) and HDDs (hard disk drives).
This is because its main partners (AU Optronics and Chimei Innolux) are based in South Korea and Taiwan.
This means that the outfit will not have anything to stop it from promoting all of the notebooks, netbooks, tablets, monitors and all other sorts of hardware it deals in.
The other 'fortunate' fact is that Acer ships relatively small amounts of any of the above in Japan, meaning that its overall, worldwide shipments won't suffer that much.
In related news, it appears that ASUS won't have its shipments impacted either, for much the same reasons. What remains to be seen is how many of all other IT players get out of this without too much trouble.