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Thai flood ripples set to impact entire world PC market

Forecast graphs dip into the red zone

The Thai floods have dampened Goldman Sachs outlook for global PC sales forcing it to downgrade forecasts for this quarter and next.

The devastation to the disk drive industry, particularly WD and Toshiba, is starting to feed through into the supply chain with PC vendors already confirming price rises and warning of shortages in the run up to Christmas and beyond.

The investment banker has lowered initial unit estimates for Q4 from 3.1 per cent growth to a decline of three per cent, and expects the drive shortages to deteriorate early next year pulling down Q1 projections of four per cent growth to a decline of 8.5 per cent.

This will weigh heavy on Microsoft's numbers and according to reports, Goldman analyst Heather Bellini has lowered Windows sales expectations for the vendor from $5.1bn in the Xmas quarter to $5bn and from $19.4bn for the year to $19bn.

Total revenues for the software maker's December quarter are predicted to fall from $20.9bn to $20.8 and for the fiscal year from $74.8bn to $74.3bn - down a whopping half a billion dollars.

As revealed by El Reg yesterday, Dell's BTO model - which it always talks up as an advantage over rivals - leaves it more exposed to the dearth of drives across the industry than rivals, according to analyst Context.

Gartner said it has yet to quantify the top level impact of the drive shortages on PC availability. ®

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