Western Digital is taking advantage of the hype surrounding artificial intelligence to boost its profits. How? Simply by relying more on sea freight, and less on air freight. Secondly, the company is raising its prices. Yes, demand is strong and potentially outstripping supply, so now’s the time to line your pockets.
Western Digital: hard disk prices set to rise!
Clearly, some manufacturers of storage solutions have already undertaken to increase their selling prices. This has already been announced by SanDisk and Micron. Western Digital has also announced a price increase. The reason? The “unprecedented” rise in demand. It has to be said that the creation of the new AI market has boosted component sales. This has been felt at NVIDIA, but overall, it’s the entire pro market that’s benefited. Because when you order servers for training and inference, you also need storage media to store user data, for example.
Western Digital has therefore announced that this price increase will apply to all the brand’s hard disks, and that it will be implemented gradually. On the other hand, the company indicates that it is to invest and continue to innovate. Furthermore, in the same press release, the company mentions that it intends to rely more on sea transport rather than air transport. Obviously, the brand is playing the ecology card: you understand that it’s less polluting, but it’s probably much cheaper because of the greater volumes that can be transported in one go. However, if the brand saves money and improves profits, transit times will be greatly impacted: six to ten weeks. Coupled with visibly ever-increasing demand, there’s every reason to fear that the supply chain will be tense for the foreseeable future…
