Western Digital Company, has suffered from the October floods in Thailand, the entire industry as a whole still can not recover from this disaster. First , the problem is in high concentration of not only hard drives manufactures for assembly, but also factories for the production of components.
WD Revenue for the period was $ 2 billion, were shipped 28.5 million drives, net income totaled $ 145 million or $ 0.61 per share. A year earlier, the company managed to gain $ 2.5 billion and 52.2 million drives. This week WD resumed production sliders for hard disk heads, which was stopped on 10 October. According to WD forecasts, production of hard drives will be back to the level of pre-flood only by September 2012. In this case, taking into account the demand for ultrabook and computers running Windows 8, the proposal will catch up with demand at retail only to the first half of 2013. In March, WD plans to return to the 60 percent level of production in the second quarter - 80% of production volumes, and only in the third quarter will reach the same level prior to flooding in October last year.
WD Representatives explained that component suppliers have learned from the tragedy of October, and tried to move some production to other regions. Reducing the geographic concentration of production losses from flooding and increased transportation costs will inevitably increase the cost of hard disk drives manufacturing.
The acquisition of units Hitachi, producing hard drives by WD's will be completed this March.