Scriven Trading Ltd, a Hong Kong-based trading arm of the Peking municipal government had to call in a US law firm after an order of 4,000 personal computers from Dell Computer were stored in unusually humid conditions. According to the Wall Street Journal, the effect was to cause many of the hard disk drives to fail, but until Scriven called in the law firm, Dell was prepared to make only very limited redress – replacement of five machines that had been pulled apart to check the problem, and replacement of the damaged disk drives at cost. The problem for Dell was that those 4,000 machines were about 20% of its total in China in 1996, and Scriven is a high-profile customer. The two now have agreement in principle on a settlement, but terms are secret.
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