Largest heist in m'sian history

this may have escaped the attention of most people, however, in the technology world, it has made headlines everywhere... the recent heist of computer products (processors + motherboards) from a warehouse in penang... the total value of the items is about RM 47million... quite a big haul...

it is interesting that within hours of the heist, the police have already started making arrests... their investigations have shown that this is an inside job, as the people who did the job, had to have known exactly when the items were in the warehouse... it seems that the items were due for export very soon... and the window of opportunity was quite short...

the way that the heist was conducted is also quite interesting... the robbers dressed up in RELA uniforms and got in on the pretense that they were going to round up illegal immigrants... and once they got in, they opened up their lorries and out jumped around 20 other people (very trojan horse-ish)... they rounded up all the security guards, drugged them and went about their business...

now, no names were mentioned in the media... however, it doesn't take one long to deduce that it's most likely intel... there are only two major computer processor manufacturers in bayan lepas... and only one of them is a major motherboard producer as well....

very soon after the heist made the front page, maskargo came out with a statement denying that they were in charge of the warehouse... the warehouse was (through some complex machination) owned by some other company.. and some other company ran the security (or rather, lack of) as well.. well, i guess they had to wash their hands as their names came up in all the articles..

an interesting article today quoted some analyst from some market research firm who said that this heist, would affect PC shipments worldwide as the items were due for shipment all over the world... however, i question this conclusion...

the thieves would have to get rid of their illegal goods anyway... i'm pretty sure that they didn't do this in order to construct super computing cluster themselves.. so, what would they do with so many computer parts?? they'd obviously try to peddle it off through whatever back channels there are... (note to self: find back channels... d:)

i'm sure that a whole bunch of these items would wind up in retail channels (think lowyat/imbi) in the near future... the same goes for other places around the world... so, why would it affect PC shipments?? these things are still going to end up in retail channels around the world.. unless of course the thieves don't sell the items.. but why would they do that??

i wonder if this would affect the short term prices of these items... if the retail channels were suddenly flooded with these illegal items that need to be gotten rid off quickly, the retailers may drop the prices in order to sell them off... maybe it's a good time to shop for a computer...