Wednesday, September 4th 2013
Massive Fire at SK Hynix Facility in Wuxi, China
A massive fire broke out this afternoon (local time), at a SK Hynix production facility in Wuxi, China. At this moment, pictures and videos of the fire are swarming through local social networks, and there are no official announcements by either the local authorities, or the company itself. Incidentally, this isn't the first fire accident at an SK Hynix manufacturing facility, a Korea-based fab suffered one in February 2008. The facility hit by fire is rumored to be one that handles packaging (placing bumped dies inside ceramic or plastic shells, and labeling them). If the extant of damage to the facility is high, it might affect NAND flash prices more than DRAM, since the company recently prioritized NAND flash over DRAM for the facility.
Source:
ChipHell Forums
38 Comments on Massive Fire at SK Hynix Facility in Wuxi, China
This might be enough reason for me to finally go get me one of those SSD's
Hynix directors are already in a crisis meeting discussing what to do with all the extra money the coming years, new yacht anyone :toast:
I am off shopping
On a serious note, this sucks.
If world production of memory goes down and the demand from industry exceed the supply then prices can double even triple.
This has happened several times in the past with both memory and harddrives.
Last victim was the harddrives, a flood happened in thailand almost a couple of years ago and
prices over doubled even tripled in some cases. The prices are still recovering and some time next year will they be back to normal. That is over two years recovery time for a flood at just hit one of the worlds harddrive factorys.
If this puts a 10% or more dent in the worlds production of dram and/or nand we are in for a price increase.
Some manufacturers have over capacity in their production but they often choose not to increase production so the can make more money. You could call them evil but they want to take every opportunity to make money and a fire like this is perfect for fueling their greed and lining their pockets with big money.
Seagate did it with harddrives, when WD had problems delivering after the flood seagate raked in big money by keeping the production level and letting the prices go up.
To early to tell today but in four to six week we should know the answer.