Samsung Electronics Co, the world's largest chip maker, said yesterday that it expects to meet production targets and quarterly earnings estimates despite a power outage at a chip manufacturing plant last week.
All six chip production lines at a factory near Seoul resumed normal operations on Saturday after an electrical blow out a day earlier caused an estimated 40 billion won (US$43 million) in losses, Samsung said in a statement.
"We plan to compensate for the production losses," Choi Chang-sik, senior vice president of the company, told reporters without providing specific figures.
"The company was able to resume normal operations quickly ... and its third quarter result will speak for itself," said Hwang Chang-gyu, president of Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business.
The cause of the outage is still being looked into, he said.
The production loss for flash memory could drive up prices in the NAND-flash market and help competitors, analysts in South Korea said yesterday.
NAND flash are used for making cellphones, portal media, iPOD and iPhones and other devices.
The actual loss could be much bigger than it appears, as analysts estimate the opportunity cost could be as high as US$108 million to US$217 million, depending on how quickly the company can get back to full production.
The affected lines represent more than half of the Samsung's total NAND-flash output.
The production cut is forecast to tip the scale in favor of suppliers by removing some of the Samsung's NAND-producing capacity.
"The accident would lead Samsung to produce around 80 percent of what it had previously planned in the quarter ahead," said Kim Byung-gi, a semiconductor analyst with Kium Securities in Seoul.
"This will certainly be a good news for its peers Hynix and Toshiba," he said.
Samsung accounts for 43.9 percent of the NAND-flash memory market share with Toshiba Corp and Hynix ranking second and third, according to second-quarter data from Taipei-based DRAM clearinghouse DRAMeXchange (
Meanwhile, Taiwanese flash memory makers soared yesterday, defying the TAIEX's 1.3 percent dive, on anticipation of more orders in the wake of the Samsung Electronics production blip.
Shares of Adata Technology Inc (
Separately, PQI said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday that it had signed an agreement with Japan-based TDK Corp to build a joint-venture in Taiwan in developing NAND flash-related storage products and sales.
PQI will hold a 40 percent stake in the new company, while the remaining 60 percent will be held by TDK, it said.
With TDK's strength in technology and patents and PQI's edge in research and development and sales channels, the pact will enable the two companies to tap into commercial computer application business, especially the solid state disk sector, the statement said.
Additional reporting by Jessie Ho
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
China Vanke Co (萬科), China’s last major developer to have so far avoided default amid an unprecedented property crisis, has been left with little time to keep debt failure at bay after creditors spurned its proposal to push back a looming bond payment. Once China’s biggest homebuilder by sales, Vanke failed to obtain sufficient support for its plan to delay paying the 2 billion yuan (US$283.51 million) note due today, a filing to the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors showed late on Saturday. The proposal, along with two others on the ballot, would have allowed a one-year extension. All three
RSS