"DOW down sharply as coronavirus keeps investors on edge"
What a crock o' chit, these people. Keep emotions out of it, or get the hell out of the kitchen and let the real investors cook.
Actually it might have some serious effects.
China has already extended the New Year holiday by several days, and individual provinces may extend it up to another week more. Throughout Asia I think there are other countries doing the same. That in itself is a significant drag to business this quarter.
In many ways, this is an event already probably greater in magnitude and disruption than the Japanese earthquake/tsunami a couple years ago. That caused major disruption to the markets for electronic components. But I think its effects were limited to certain specialized components, whereas China is a huge supplier of basically everything.
Beyond that, we don't know exactly how far and badly this will spread. Travel restrictions, extended holidays in Asia, and other related supply chain disruptions can have a lot of downstream effects. This is akin to a major natural disaster occurring there, but perhaps worse in that the true scope isn't yet known.
I've had meetings with quite a few customers this week and one of the main topics of conversation was whether, and to what extent, coronavirus would disrupt supply chains for electronic components. If you can't get components you need, you can't build products, and then you can't sell what you didn't build, so companies will see nonzero revenue disruption from this event. Investors *should* be wary.
(As with anything else, of course, there are opportunities here. Shortages mean higher prices for certain components, which means higher profits for the suppliers of those components who are unaffected by the disruption, but lower profits for the users of those components. So there will be pockets of companies who benefit from this as well as those who will suffer.)
