Blockbuster! Toshiba halts production for a month!

Source: 　　Editor: admin Update Time :2019-07-03

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This morning, Toshiba announced that some production lines at the main production site of NAND Flash, the "Yokkaichi factory", have been suspended due to outage on June 15th. So it is resuming operations successively and all production equipments are expected to resume in the middle of July. The Yokkaichi factory is operated by Toshiba Memory Corporation and Western Digital(WD).

Toshiba

On June 28th，WD announced that due to the outage of Yokkaichi factory the company is expected to reduce NAND supply by about 6 EB that is equivalent to about 2 percent of the industry's annual supply based on the estimates of survey companies. The impact of outages on performance is expected to occur between July and September 2019.
Five of Toshiba's NADN factories suffered power outages at 6:25 p.m. on June 15, but it lasted only 13 minutes before power was restored.

Even though the outage just lasted 13 minutes，the impact could be serious if it causes an accident in the unique manufacturing process of wafer fabs. Toshiba has previously said it would take several days or weeks to recover, but it has not yet provided an official explanation for the outage. So it still remains unknown that Wafer damage, capacity recovery, market supply and other issues, which leaves imagination space to the market.

At present, The key question is the full extent of the damage caused by the outage. If the losses are small, Toshiba and Western Digital could afford them. But if the damages are severe, NAND flash market supply will changes and the prices of it are likely to rise.

Although Toshiba has not released details ,Western Digital mentions that the outage will result in 6 EB of flash memory loss——EB refers to Exabyte, 1EB=1000PB=1000000TB,which is almost equivalent to the loss of 12 million 500GB hard disk based on mainstream 500GB SSD hard disk.

Western Digital presents the loss of 6 EB will be reflected in Q1 of fiscal year 2020 and it is collaborating closely with Toshiba to restore normal operations as soon as possible.