Excuses never ends in tech industry. First it was notebooks, tablets, smart phones and watches, smart automative parts, continued with electricity, weather and earthquakes... they never run out excuses but one thing is for certain prices go up for their own benefit.
I would say that the bigger issue right now is not related to natural disasters, but simply down to a shortage of multiple key components that makes the world go around and I'm not talking about anything used to make chips. There's a shortage of shipping containers and all the big shipping companies have placed massive orders for more shipping containers, but they don't make themselves and as there's a pandemic still going on, it affects workers at factories that produce said containers, as all of a sudden there are restrictions in place which means the work stops or slows down significantly. Once the container is made, it needs to be shipped and filled with goods and some countries are now seeing a shortage of lorry drivers. Once filled with goods, they need to be taken to a port, many of which are currently overflowing with goods due to previous restrictions which caused massive backlogs. There the containers wait to go on the right ship, which can be over a month these days, as there are queues to get into the ports to offload and load the cargo ships. Then you have a ~20-30 days journey depending on if the goods are going to the US west coast or east coast, or Europe. There the ships have to queue again to get into to port to offload the cargo and at least in the US, this is now taking longer than expected to due to pandemic prevention measurements. Then finally they get put on another lorry and taken to a warehouse somewhere before being distributed. Let's not forget that fuel prices just hit a new high for this year.
Now some goods are going by air, due to the shipping mess, but with both sea and air shipping at an all-time high in terms of cost (up to 10-12x of normal costs), it's simply not possible to ship some low-cost goods, as the profit would be lost in shipping costs alone. This may or may not be a good thing depending on the goods.
All these things are outside of the manufacturers control, yet it increases their costs by a significant margin, something that in the end is going to end up affecting the final cost of whatever product it is. So no, it's not an excuse, this is how it is in the real world right now and it's going to affect anything that's being imported. This is also why more and more companies are looking to shift at least some of their production to the same continent at the very least, but that's not done overnight.
I've spoken to some hardware companies that are considering shifting their production away from the PRC, not because of the pandemic as such, but because they've not been able to keep the same quality level as they're used to when they can't have boots on the ground. This is going to be a long term concern as well, since if you can't trust your manufacturing partner to do the job they're paid to do when you don't have people at the factory, then you're going to be losing money, fast.
It's going to take a few years, but expect to see a change of where things are manufactured, at least from smart companies that have realised that the money they were saving on manufacturing in the PRC is no longer there, so they might as well move the production somewhere more reliable.
ir.amd.com
