Posted on Monday, July 30 2012 @ 13:25 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
X-bit Labs
reports Western Digital confirmed that it will not restore all of its manufacturing capacity that it owned before it got struck by the Thai floods given the current macroeconomic situation. This is bad news for consumers, as it will keep HDD prices at a higher level.
Even though Western Digital clearly returned its position as the world's largest maker of hard disk drives with 71 million units shipped, which is around five million more than Seagate supplied in approximately the same time frame, the company said it would not restore all of manufacturing capacities it and Hitachi GST owned before the flood given the current macroeconomic situation.
"We expect that we will not spend the full recovery capital that we indicated of $650 million now, because, obviously, we are not bringing the capacity back to the same level. We earmarked that number at about $400 million as oppose to the $650 million," said Wolfgang Nickl, chief financial officer of Western Digital, during a conference call with financial community.
