• ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 hours ago

    Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.

    This is exceedingly normal procedure for manufacturing companies, and not limited to tech industry by any means. They know how much they can potentially produce on their lines, if they have predicted customers to fulfill the capacity for a full year they are basically sold out despite not having produced most of it yet.

    The company I work for also has “sold out” for several of our factories because we have orders for 110% production capacity on them. Orders are not paid up front, they never are in any industry, it’s always paid after delivery usually with a 30-90 days delay (and even more in some cases).

    There is nothing spectacularly weird or out of place in the announcement they’ve made, it’s basically standard procedure.

    • Jul (they/she)@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it’s likely these won’t actually get purchased. They shouldn’t reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they’d have to actually sell for a fair price and they’d be concerned that they likely won’t get paid for these “reservations”.