Acer first PC vendor to confirm price hike

Impact of Thai flooding on disk drives blamed

Acer has become the first major PC vendor to confirm a price rise in response to flooding in Thailand, which it says has led to a 20 per cent hike in the cost of disk drives.

This comes just days after Acer described the outlook for HDD supplies as uncertain, while rivals firms agreed drive component prices would head north, and analyst Gartner claimed PC shortages were "inevitable".

"We have seen a hard disk price rise so we have started to raise prices on future orders to cope with the rising cost," said president Jim Wong, according to reports by news agency Reuters.

The flooding in Thailand – the second largest disk drive producer after China – has hit WD in particular but a Toshiba plant is also submerged and Seagate has reported some impact on sub-assembly suppliers.

As revealed this week, Acer losses in Q3 shrunk to NT$1.1bn (£22.9m) compared to NT$6.79bn (£143m) in the previous three months.

One positive development, according to the firm, was that its inventory levels – which have been a problem this year – had also narrowed.

But it hasn't turned the corner quite yet as the firm expects sales for the current quarter, calendar Q4, which is traditionally its busiest, to slump by 10 per cent.

The one-time high-flying Taiwanese firm came unstuck as consumer demand for low-cost notebooks stalled, in part due to the economy and in part due to the growing appetite for fondleslabs.

Only yesterday Acer confirmed that EMEA president Walter Deppeler is moving into the chief marketing officer's shoes, with the boss of its China operations, Oliver Ahrens, replacing him. ®