For example Hollywood is a big consumer of video tape which is largely produced in Japan.
A specific example would of of Echelon, a San Francisco based company which sells 'smart meters' to monitor electricity consumption. Echelon's executive board recently held an emergency meeting to pre-order a stock of products to deal with the possibility of a disturbance in production.
As of right now, most Japanese firms have been un-phased by the disaster. However it doesn't take much to stagnate the production process of technical firms, as is the case with Japan. Firms such as Echelon are strategically dealing with worst case possibilities as they have to pay large compensations to their customers for delivering late on their contracts.
The nuclear scare may have been highly dramatized by the media, but the speculation has tangible results.
4 comments:
It is interesting how much the media's over-dramatization of the nuclear scare in japan has had an affect on speculation on high quality technical goods produced by Japan. The scare alone that Japan will not be able to meet production demands because the country itself will be wiped off the map drove consumers to buy as many Japanese owned products as possible. One would be led to assume that most companies would of had more accurate information regarding the state of affairs in Japan. Panic seems to be a great motivator in driving sales of seemingly scarce products, even though those products might not be as scarce as led to believe.
I agree with the above comment. This expected shortage is doing more to affect business decisions than the affect of an actual shortage of goods. Although it is hard to determine what the effect of this disaster will be, it is clear that Japan's economy could be greatly harmed by its foreign investors' decisions.
The disaster in Japan not only caused the expected shortage of products from Japan by foreign companies, but also a shortage of supply, consumer goods such as food in particular, in the country. It now seems that the nuclear plant is under control, and Japan is starting to recover on its economy. As said in the article, most Japanese firms have been un-phased by the disaster, so hopefully the supply of Japanese products will be stable.
Smart meters, mentioned in the article, is the new idea for more green energy consumption - that every home and office has a smart meter to show how much electricity you are using at a given time and allow for you to then choose to decrease consumption or change your high consumption times to a different time of day (for example, using a lot more energy for say washing clothes is more expensive when everyone is trying to use a lot of energy. Right now we cannot see these things but it is assumed that if we could see and then choose, we would and would therefore consume less...
I hope this shortage doesn't put a halt in green energy development...
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