Operations at two Japanese factories producing flash memory chips have been disrupted by the contamination of industrial materials, chipmaker Kioxia Corp said yesterday.
It comes as the tech industry grapples with a global semiconductor shortage that has hampered the manufacturing of numerous products from vehicles to gaming consoles.
Kioxia said that it suspected the “contamination of materials used in the manufacturing processes” at its production facilities leading to operations being partially suspended, without giving further details.
The company, a spin-off of Japanese conglomerate Toshiba Corp, said it was working to restore full output at the factories in central and northern Japan as soon as possible.
Kioxia’s US-based partner, Western Digital Corp, also confirmed the disruption and estimated that it would cause “a reduction of flash availability of at least 6.5 exabytes” at the plants, which are run by the two companies as a joint venture.
A unit of digital data, there are 1 billion gigabytes in an exabyte.
The type of memory chips affected is called NAND flash chips. They are different from the semiconductors currently in short supply worldwide, which use older technology.
“If this creates a shortage, then prices will rise,” said Jim Handy, a semiconductor industry expert at Objective Analysis.
Two factories being affected “implies that a supplier shipped bad chemicals” to Kioxia, he said.
“Other NAND flash makers are likely to purchase materials from the same supplier, so this could be a big issue,” he added.
Kioxia, together with Western Digital, holds a 35 percent market share of the global flash memory industry, its Web site said.
Ace Research Institute analyst Hideki Yasuda told Bloomberg News that the disruption could increase flash memory prices, “further adding fuel to the recent component price hike trend stemming from supply shortages.”
Separately, Sumco Corp, a key supplier of silicon wafers for the semiconductor industry, said that it has sold out its production capacity through 2026, a sign that shortages in the industry might not abate for years.
The Japanese company has orders to cover all output of its 300mm wafers for the next five years, it said after reporting earnings on Wednesday.
It is not taking such long-term orders for 150mm and 200mm wafers, but demand is likely to keep surpassing supply for years to come, the company said.
The price of wafers rose by 10 percent last year over the previous year and Sumco expects to see increases continue until at least 2024.
The company said that it could not expand production this year, despite robust demand from customers desperate for long-term supplies.
The company has done what it can in terms of optimizing existing production lines, and its supply-demand imbalance is consistent across its full range of products, Sumco added.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS