IT industry suffers from shock: inevitable increase in prices of electronic equipment

Memory card prices, flash memory supply, fiber optic cable repair needs to wait, Nissan products were smashed goods ... ... March 11, Japan's 9.0 magnitude earthquake impact on the IT industry, the rest has reached China. The “IT Times” reporter was divided into multiple branches. After interviewing related industries, it was discovered that the impact of the IT industry on this round of shock waves was relatively cautious. However, Nissan’s ordinary consumer goods sales increased considerably. In fact, as of press time, everything has only just begun.

IT Times reporter Lin Fei, Qian Lifu, and Qiu Yunwang, inevitably rising prices of electronic equipment According to statistics, in 2010, the output value of electronic equipment in Japan accounted for 13.9% of the global market share in the same year. In the same year, Japan’s semiconductor output accounted for more than 20% of the global market share. After the earthquake, information compiled by the Taiwan Extension Industry Research Institute showed that in the five major industries of computer systems, semiconductors, LCD panels, consumer electronics and communications, a total of 21 related companies' factories were affected, including Sony, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Toshiba. , Texas Instruments, Renesas and other world-renowned companies.

Liu Yu, director of communications strategy at Nomura Research Consulting Co., Ltd., told the IT Times reporter that Japan is an important high-end IT manufacturing industry in the world. The tsunami caused by earthquakes and earthquakes has caused many factories in the disaster-affected areas to directly stop production. At first glance, the lack of electricity supply caused by the earthquake has also affected the production in other regions, so the output of the manufacturing industry will inevitably drop.

Regarding the long-term impact of the earthquake on the ICT market, Yang Shengfan, deputy director of the Taiwan Extension Industry Institute, gave a more optimistic forecast. In the absence of a larger accident, the impact of the earthquake will gradually decrease within six months. The plant will find alternative sources, while Japanese companies are expected to resume production smoothly, except for the reduction of capacity due to power cuts.

Lithium laptop battery: affect the global supply 50%

The research institute DIGITIMES Research believes that strong earthquakes have little impact on the global NAND Flash, display and LED industry chain, or are within the controllable range, but will have a greater impact on the supply of lithium batteries for notebooks. Its senior analyst Jianpei Ping said that Sony lithium battery cell factories are all located in the earthquake area, but as long as the supply of raw materials upstream is flawless, the problem is not great. However, Japan has a global lithium battery material output value of more than 50%, which accounted for 55% of the global market for electrolytic copper foil battery Furukawa Electric and Mitsubishi Chemical accounts for the world's battery electrolyte raw material EC20 ~ 25% of the market, its 100% and 20% % of the capacity of the factory is located in the disaster area or near the disaster area of ​​the city, the application of its materials in the notebook industry is relatively high, will cover the supply of notebook lithium batteries in the next few months. Yang Shengfan believes that if the problem of power curtailment cannot be solved, it will start from the laptop and cause a negative impact on the overall ICT industry supply chain.

Yang Shengfan also said that memory is another component that may be impacted. Although Elpida and Toshiba’s memory production lines are located in the Kansai region, which is almost unaffected, some of the upstream material suppliers’ factories in the northeast region have been affected by the tsunami, causing short-term failure to restore supply, which will also make memory prices stop. fall.

Flash memory: Chip supplier has suspended the supply of iSuppli analyst Gu Wenjun told reporters that because the earthquake-stricken area is the area where the semiconductor industry chain in Japan is concentrated, together with its own memory and memory card, it is a market with obvious factors of “roasting”, so it is very There may be funds to use speculation to speculate on the price of flash memory chips, pushing up the price of flash memory chips in the global market. If the relevant factory can resume normal production within two weeks, the degree of impact will gradually decrease. He also stated that other suppliers of CMOS sensors and MCU microprocessors for key components in digital cameras have also been affected by the earthquake, which may drive the price of terminal digital products.

The reporter visited the two digital product stores in Pudong on the 15th and found that there were no significant price increases for products including memory and digital cameras. The staff of the two markets' U disk and memory card agents told reporters that at present, there has been no news of price increases sent by the company, and there has been no case of consumers rushing to buy. Miss Liu of the marketing department of a Taiwanese-funded storage product company told the reporter: “At present, upstream chip makers have already announced the suspension of supply, waiting for the situation to become clearer. Whether it is a price increase or how much it will rise, it may wait for a clear next week. We are already slowing shipments now."

The one-month earthquake required for full restoration of communications not only caused serious damage to Japan’s domestic communications, but also caused the local communications network to be interrupted. In addition, some submarine cables from Japan to the United States and China’s submarine cable through Japan’s submarine cable disrupted successively, including Japan’s and the United States’s. PC-1 System, Japan-US Cable System, China-US and Asia Pacific 2. In subsequent monitoring, Shanghai Telecom's NOC (Network Maintenance Operation Center) discovered that the 22.5G bandwidth from Shanghai to Japan was interrupted by 21.7G. Only one 622M circuit did not break, and the congestion was serious. The North American direction dropped from 135G to 112.5G.

The Chinese users basically returned to normal. "In this earthquake, the submarine cable breaks mainly from Japan to the United States. There are a lot of damages to the circuits in the country and the United States, but the impact is not as large as that of the 2006 seas in Taiwan. Yang Chuanwen, general manager of China Undersea Cable Construction Co., Ltd. told the IT Times reporter. Yao Liang, the person in charge of Shanghai Telecom’s GNOC (International Network Maintenance Operation Center), also stated that “this Japanese earthquake has caused severe damage to the international submarine cable, but domestic operators have quickly recovered the circuit through various means, such as through the cable sub , Looking for the corresponding operators abroad to cooperate with the recovery circuit." By March 13, seven 10G circuits and two 2.5G circuits in the direction of the United States were restored. By 12:00 on March 14th, ChinaNet Shanghai International has restored 83% of available bandwidth to North America, and domestic network users are basically using it.

Yao Liang said that it is necessary to wait 1-2 months for the submarine cable communication caused by the earthquake to completely return to normal. “Generally speaking, it was found that a submarine cable was broken, and then it took two weeks to ship and repair it. But this time, Japan was in the direction of the United States. If the cable is broken too much, the cable-ship may be too busy to wait for a while to be repaired."

Japan’s emergency strategy is worth learning. Although the Japanese operator’s network was affected by the earthquake and the severely-affected areas were unable to communicate, some areas still could not access the telephone. However, Liu Yu believes that the Japanese operator’s emergency response mechanism is complete and is in disaster. In this case, communication security can be carried out in an orderly manner. A typical example is to confirm that the base station in the disaster-stricken area has been destroyed and that operators dispatch emergency telecommunication vehicles to evacuation sites such as schools at the first time to ensure communication in the areas where people gather.

In addition, Liu Yu disclosed that Japanese telecom operators have the assurance that information can be released to all relevant personnel and emergency command departments in the shortest possible time and can be linked to emergency command ICT solutions. “If NTT Group has a seismic solution that guarantees highly accurate data and can send information to multiple departments within one second, in this disaster, these ICT applications and communication infrastructure together ensure the rapid spread of information. Japanese operators also adopted many emergency tactics in this disaster, such as delaying users' payment date, free phone calls, and reduction of telephone repair costs."

The source of online shopping has taken a close grip on the impact of the earthquake in Japan, and users have also encountered waves in online shopping for Japanese goods. According to a survey conducted by the IT Times, many domestic buyers responded quickly and almost immediately went to the Internet to rush to buy products from Japan. Coupled with the tight supply of hot products, logistics lag and other factors, inventory warnings, prices of goods and so on.

"Amoy Japan" is often used by buyers who are used to looking for "Japan Shopping Service" on Taobao for three days. It is found that more than half of these online shop customers are offline. The shopping platform “Amoy Japan” created by Alibaba Group and Japan’s Softbank Group also issued a notice. “Since the 9th-placed earthquake affected all aspects of Japan, including the Japanese sellers on the Japanese market, it started on March 14th. The website was closed for three days, and the site did not open until March 16.

"Amoy Japan" also deliberately indicated in the closing statement that "the users who have already placed orders on the site, the delivery of goods will be delayed" and left a customer service call. Since the system of “Amoy Japan” is not the same as Taobao, it is impossible to directly contact the Japanese sellers through Wangwang and other tools to know exactly what the other party is. Therefore, at the beginning of the earthquake, the futures products are delayed and many buyers are worried. Only communicate with customer service.

The Chinese version of the famous Japanese B2C online shopping platform “Rakuten Market” also made an announcement: “Because of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake in the northeastern Japan, some shops cannot provide normal services. In order to guarantee your orders, logistics companies are adjusting some measures. However, Some orders may be cancelled or out of the list. Please forgive me."

Milk powder overseas purchasing out of stock "Moon and Moon's Little Shop" is a five-crown shop on Taobao that can sell 500 to 600 pieces of Japanese milk powder every month. The reporter saw the purchase of powdered milk in a few days after the earthquake. 8 cans, 10 cans of buyers, due to unprecedented purchases, the store inventory warned.

The shop staff told reporters on March 14th that the customer started to buy several boxes of boxes of powdered milk after escalating the impact of the Japanese earthquake the night before. “The crazy buying has caused several days of business in the past few days. All of our departments are operating at an overloaded level. What the warehouse can do now is to do its utmost to send as many goods as possible in the order of payment, but there is no guarantee that the goods on that day will be issued on the same day."

The reporter also consulted several other large-volume Japanese milk powder online shops and found that the problem of out-of-stock also plagued them.

While the Japanese-made milk powder suffered such a frantic rush, the milk powder in the Netherlands, New Zealand and other countries also became the new darling of domestic mothers. The business of purchasing Dutch milk powder on Taobao was obviously better, which even directly affected the local supermarkets in the Netherlands. The purchase of milk powder.

Ms. Xu, who had just given birth to her baby, asked her classmates in the Netherlands to bring back her milk powder. However, she learned from her classmates that the production of milk powder in the Netherlands was not so much in Japan. As the Chinese people rushed to buy a lot of food these days, some local small The supermarket’s inventory was in a hurry, requiring only 2 purchases per person.

Japanese cosmetics rose slightly for a number of years in the Taobao business cosmetics cosmetics shop Miss Zhou told reporters that she used to telephone, Internet and other ways directly to the Japanese manufacturers or drug store orders, the recent batch of goods fortunately before the earthquake Transported to. However, due to the fact that Chiba Prefecture, which has been exposed to unusually high nuclear radiation, is a lot of cosmetic production bases, she has encountered many buyers repeatedly asking for arrival time and place of origin. Miss Zhou expressed that she was equally worried that she would not dare to purchase goods from Japan in the next two months.

The rising prices of cosmetics have been quietly carried out in other online stores. Taobao dispensers “Sunny Billy” said that the Japanese cosmetics line headed by the popular SANA soy milk series had risen in price across the board, but the increase was not a few dollars. The reason is that with the extension of nuclear radiation problems, it will be difficult to purchase in the future.

Wu crown shop "Mei Shan" customer service told reporters that the purchase price of cosmetics over there in Japan, so the price rose accordingly, such as FANCL 120ML speed net cleansing oil rose from 135 yuan to 145 yuan. There are only a few brands involved in the current price increase, but the possibility of re-price increases is still relatively large. She also said that although cosmetic products are not as serious as milk powder, they have shown some signs in the past few days. Under normal circumstances, customers can take more than 10 pieces of goods at a time and they can supply them. However, these days they are out of stock. .

iPad2 purchase indefinitely many operators "Japanese purchasing iPad2" online sellers, then fall into a dilemma. The original Japan was listed on the second batch of iPad2 offering countries on March 25. However, due to the earthquake, Apple Japan’s official website has now withdrawn the logo that was released on March 25. However, no specific date of release has been given. One of Mr. Sun, a domestic seller hanging out of “Japan’s iPad2 purchase,” told reporters bluntly that he would not take this product first because he feared some changes and could only wait for news from Japan in the near future. Another owner of the "Osaka Express" who is purchasing digital products from Japan is still in Japan, but he can't explain the local time to market iPad2. He only told reporters, "Let's ask about it two weeks later."