Thai floods cripple manufacture and tourist trade

Thailand has always been a popular tourist destination, but now hit by flooding that has lasted weeks the tourists have stopped coming. Other key areas of the Thai economy have been badly affected - such as the manufacture of electronics components.

Flood-hit Thai warned of reptiles in waters

Tourists Vanish on Floods Leaving Bangkok Empty

Bloomberg, 

6 November, 2011

Saijai Sooksai kills time by arranging and rearranging T-shirts imprinted with Ferrari and Ralph Lauren logos at her streetside stall in Bangkok’s main tourist district. She has little else to do as Thailand’s record floods deter visitors.

“Business is really bad as tourists from Europe and the Middle East have almost all vanished,” said Saijai, who has run a stall on Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Road near the Nana area for more than a decade. “I should be easily getting 10,000 baht ($326) a day this time of year, but now I earn only a couple of hundred some days -- not even enough to cover my rent.”

While central Bangkok has avoided flooding so far, hotels and office buildings have erected walls of sandbags to protect against waters that have killed more than 500 people nationwide. The threat has also deterred tourists, forcing Singapore Airlines Ltd. and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. (293) to cut flights, hitting reservations at Shangri-La Asia Ltd. (69) hotels and contributing to the central bank cutting its growth forecast.

“The leisure business has disappeared for the time being,” Cathay Pacific Chief Executive Officer John Slosar said on Nov. 4 at an airline association meeting in Seoul. “If you have an option to go, probably you won’t because nobody can quite tell what you’ll get when you get there.”

The airline has cut one of its five daily services to Bangkok, and is only filling about 50 percent of seats on its remaining flights, he said. Normally, the flights would be around 80 percent full, he said. Disruptions may not last long, he said.

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Thailand Flooding Cripples Hard-Drive Suppliers

Factories in Pathum Thani Province outside Bangkok last month. Pumps are expected to begin lowering water levels on Monday.

New York Times

In the neck-deep floodwaters of an industrial zone here, workers are using Jet Skis and wooden skiffs to transport stacks of computer components out of waterlogged factories.

Three weeks after monsoon run-off swamped more than 1,000 factories across central Thailand, the brown, corrosive floodwaters have only slightly receded, leaving the world’s largest computer makers without a reliable forecast about when crucial parts will be available once again.

Consumers worldwide could see increases of at least 10 percent in the price of external hard drives because of the flooding, according to Fang Zhang, an analyst at IHS iSuppli, a market research company. The effect will be less noticeable for laptops and desktop computers, he estimated, because demand has been weakened by the current global economic malaise.

The image of Thailand as a land of temples, beaches and smiles has over the years been reinforced by the country’s tourism advertising campaigns. But the flooding here, the worst in at least five decades, has revealed to the world the scale of Thailand’s industrialization and the extent to which two global industries, computers and cars, rely on components made here.

The world’s biggest names in hard-drive manufacturing, for example, operate from Thailand, where suppliers and customers come together.

Until the floodwaters came, a single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital produced one-quarter of the world’s supply of “sliders,” an integral part of hard-disk drives. Over the weekend, workers in bright orange life jackets salvaged what they could from the top floors of the complex. The ground floor resembled an aquarium and the loading bays were home to jumping fish.

“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” said John Monroe, an expert on storage devices at Gartner, a technology research firm. He estimated it would take a full year for hard-drive production to return to preflood levels.

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