Above: The historic Thai floods impact factories in Indiana
ASUS: ‘We run out of hard disks at the end of the month’ – theregister.co.uk, October 31, 2011
Firm: Thai floods won’t drive big SSD uptick – eetimes.com, November 1, 2011
Thailand floods could create laptop shortage – CNN, November 1, 2011
Submerged Thailand Slips Against Peers – WSJ, November 2, 2011
…Where Thailand has struggled, economists say, is in attracting newer companies at a time when there are many more emerging markets taking steps to encourage foreign investment than in the 1980s and 1990s.
“The investors who are already there [in Thailand] tend to put more money in because they know the environment and are comfortable there, but if it’s putting money into totally new investments, a lot of those companies now bypass Thailand,” said Frederic Neumann, a regional economist at HSBC in Hong Kong. He described the past 10 years as “kind of Thailand’s ‘lost decade,’ ” with minimal real wage gains, while workers in places such as Indonesia, Vietnam and China have seen relatively strong wage increases…