Thai Floods Cause Global Hard Drive Shortage

We start this week with the terrible news of severe flooding in Thailand, particularly in Bangkok and the 7 surrounding industrial estates. Thailand supplies up to 40% of the hard drives in the world with manufacturers such as Samsung, Acer, Toshiba and Western Digital all being forced to abandon their factories and wait for the water levels to recede.

Initial estimates put the delay at several months with companies aiming to begin to pump water out of their flooded premises on Nov 10. After draining the water, clean-up work is estimated to take about a month with another three to four months needed to repair damaged machinery.

These factories don’t expect to resume operations and production until well into 2012 – we are looking at almost 6 months of down time in producing hard drives from the region.

All of this turmoil has already had a major effect on hard drive prices due to shortages. Our supplier has tripled the price, with major retailers such as Currys / PC World restricting purchases to one per customer. This situation is only due to worsen as the holiday season approaches and demand increases. PCs and laptops will be more expensive this Christmas, that’s for sure!

How will this impact your purchase of a custom arcade cabinet from Bespoke Arcades?

Let us just start by saying that our hearts go out to the victims of this disaster – one of many to hit the region in 2011. At the moment, we undertake to absorb all inflated costs ourselves without passing them on to customers.

Our Play system is unaffected, but we may be forced to supply a smaller hard drive for now (for our Media and Elite systems – this will have no impact on game-play), with a promise to send on either an external or internal hard drive as soon as the crisis subsides. WE GUARANTEE TO DELIVER AT LEAST THE SIZE ADVERTISED.

We will review our policy in the New Year, but for now – that’s our word…. Happy Gaming!!