Selling Copiers & MPF's "The Perfect Storm"

Since 2007 our industry has been tested with the Great Recession, many of the companies we did bsuiness with are now out of business or just fighting to stay alive.

Some say the Great Recession is over, I'm not buying it, I think we've never come out of it.

The Great Recession is one part of the Perfect Storm that's humbled our industry.  Years ago, talk was that the copier industry was always the least affected when there was an economic slowdown.  Those days are gone...probably forever. 

In early March the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 8.9 devastated Northern Japan with a Sunami, failure of the Fukushima Nuclear reactors and caused severe supply chain issues for companies like Ricoh, Canon, Toshiba, Fuji Xerox along with all of the secondary tech companies that supported the copier/printer industry. We're still feeling the effects of certain MFP models that are on the "constrained" list. Some toner supplies are still in short supply and some key factories were closed in Northern Japan to never open again.

Just last week, seems I was not even aware of this until a Print4Pay Hotel member posted a thread on the forums about the sever flooding in Thailand.  A quote for Storage Newsletter "The HDD industry never encounters such a natural disaster in its history. Earthquakes in Japan had a minor effect compared to what's happening in Thailand."

25% of all Hard Drive assembly plants are located in Thailand, 95% of all Copiers and MFP's are equipted with Hard Drives.  The shortage looms on the copier industry again, in addition another company named Nidec was hit hard.  Here's a thread from a Print4Pay Hotel member about Nidec "And everyone better hope that Nidec's factories that were hit by the flood were not its printing related factories. Few know Nidec, but they make a solid portion of the motors and brushes found in copiers."

I admit I knew nothing of the flood, and how devastating the flood is for the people of Thailand and the effect on the Bang Pa Industrial Park.

It seems it been one thing after another, the economy, the devastation in Japan and now the historic flooding in Thailand.  I'll be watching the situation with Nidec and the Hard Factories closely and I'm sure there will be additional threads posted on the Print4Pay Hotel forums from other P4P'ers.

Anyone have anything they can add on the situation in Thailand??

-=Good Selling=-