Toshiba and its partner Western Digital have issued the latest announcement on the power outage in the Japanese city of Yokkaichi.

Western digital issued a press that the outage on June 15 affected the operations of its partner Toshiba's flash memory factory. Western digital said the outage affected Toshiba facilities and process tools so it was working closely with Toshiba to restore the facilities as soon as possible.

In addition, Western Digital expects the event will reduce its flash wafer supply by about 6 ExaByte, which will continue through the first quarter of fiscal 2020.

Toshiba is now resuming production at factories in the affected areas and expects most of its production facilities put into operation by mid-July."We are doing everything we can to minimize the impact on our customers." Toshiba said

So how does the outage affect NAND Flash prices?

Affected by this incident, DRAMExchange revised its assessment of price trends in the third quarter.

DRAMExchange pointed out that 2D NAND Flash, which has turned into a niche, has been particularly affected by this incident. Since Yokkaichi's factory is still an important supply source and inventory levels of such products are low, there may be upward pressure on prices in the third quarter.

As for mainstream products such as eMMC/UFS and SSD mainly based on 3D NAND Flash architecture, the decline trend of contract prices will not be reversed, but it may be slightly restrained under the support of high inventory of both buyers and sellers in the third quarter.

In the Wafer and channel retail market, DRAMExchange is expected to bring short-term upward pressure on Wafer quotation, but it depends on customer acceptance, because Western Digital's considerable market influence and Micron's expanded yield reduction to 10 percent, as well as, the market has been under pressure near the cost line for a long time this year.

As for the outlook for the fourth quarter, DRAMExchange believes that contract prices will tend to be flat or slightly lower based on current assessments. In the same time, DRAMExchange will continue to track subsequent rework.

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