Photo credit: Daniel Julie/Flickr.

The tech industry in Europe and America could suffer from knock on effects from the tragic floods which hit Thailand in July of this year, industry leaders have warned.

The floods which devastated the Asian country over the summer months left 400 dead and thousands homeless. It also forced seven industrial plants to be abandoned.

Thailand is the world's largest manufacturer of hard disks, supplying roughly 40 per cent of the world’s needs. Though this is clearly not the primary concern, when weighed up against the tragic loss of life, the closure of some of its leading manufacturing sites could mean that companies in the West, from cloud computing providers to PC makers, may feel the side effects.

For cloud computing providers the hard disk drives are the integral component for the masses of storage capacity they offer their users.

The closure of the factories could have further impacts too. The production and sales of laptops, computer chips and tablets could also suffer as a result.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said last month: “Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point.

“It is something I am concerned about. I'm virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster.”

A butterfly flaps its wings in one place and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world, or so ‘the butterfly effect’ theory states. It appears that now, emerging out of the terrible natural disaster in the Far East, the damage that has been done to the supply chain to some of the world’s leading technology companies could scupper growth, or at very least cut into any predicted profit margins.