Global warming ‘hots’ up

11 April 2012 06:22 am

In retrospect, 26 of the 90 provinces in Thailand were seriously affected by a sheer amount of floodwaters. Many automotive-assembly plants and parts-maker factories for Honda, Toyota, Isuzu, Nissan and Ford, situated in and around Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani provinces, suffered greatly from the destructive floods, with severe effects on the world’s automotive markets. Automotive production in Thailand has certainly been affected in the near term due to the shortage of auto parts as a result of the floods, with no apparent medium- or long-term effect on the country as an automotive production hub in the region.
Almost 10 per cent of total auto parts for local production come from the country’s flood-affected regions.     A new production model would entail exploring a multi-sourcing strategy that involves not only sourcing parts from different suppliers but from different regions as well – a climatic de-risking of the supply chain with original-equipment manufacturers investing in geographic locations least impacted due to natural disasters.
As analysts have anticipated, reduced supply coupled with high capital expenditures, as a result of the floods, has meant that hard-drive prices have gone up, already engendering ripple effects across the industry. Computer makers were supply-constrained and could not make as many systems as they thought they could sell. Thus, they had no choice but to raise prices on the computers they could make to meet revenue goals.
Although the floodwaters have receded, it does not mean that hard-drive makers and component manufacturers could just walk back into their fabrication plants, flip a switch and get back to work. Some facilities remained offline as companies repaired and replaced expensive manufacturing and process equipment. The concerns among foreign investors are not only on nature’s damaging floods, but also the “political floods,” with various actors in Thai politics exploiting the disaster to undermine opponents, thus delaying necessary cooperation and the speediest solution to the problem.
By Pavin Chachavalpongpun (an associate professor at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University)