TechPulse 360

At the Seagate enterprise and security event

Not that this come as a surprise these days, but uncertainty about consumer spending this holiday season was the hot topic “du jour” at last night “enterprise and security” event hosted by Seagate.

At the meeting, attended by the San Francisco press and analysts corps as well as executives from the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company, I was surprised to hear that October was actually a very good month for the hard-disk drive maker.

Inspite of having any idea if consumers will actually rush to retail stores (online or not) to purchase electronic goods, PC makers and consumer electronics companies are fiercely building products in preparation for the holiday season. “The goal is to have them on retail shelves as soon as possible and hope consumers will come”, said one of the Seagate exec.

Credit is scarce, but hard-disk drives are really cheap these days!

At the meeting there were also fears that credit card companies start squeezing consumers, cutting back credit limits and increasing interest rates, as the New York Times reports today.

But disk drives are cheap and may even come out a lot cheaper on Black Friday – the biggest retail day of the year – thanks to “price leaders” like Simpletech or Iomega. “Sometimes prices fluctuate week over week. That’s so different from last year, when we had 6 months of price stability dues to a lack of products to sell”, added another Seagate exec.

And in these times, cheap is perhaps the only thing consumers may be willing to spend!

The first indicator of how this holiday season will turn out will be on the first Tuesday post-Thanksgiving, when retailers post their Thanksgiving weekend sales figures… It will set the trend for Christmas to come. But if its really bad, the U.S. Government might step in again to un-squeeze the credit crunch to save this holiday season.

But the fall out will eventually come… and that’s in January. I wonder what will happen at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics show happening in Las Vegas the second week of January. No more parties maybe?!