Fire at Hynix China FAB
This is not going to be good for Apple and the rest of the industry. As we know Apple's number 1 memory supplier today is Hynix and they had an explosion at their largest memory plant in Xuxi China. Currently there is extreme shortagse of memory today and this will make it worse considering Samsung has been using the majority of their memory production for their own products. You can expect pricing to go up along with not being able to get memory.
This factory makes both DRAM and NAND, and it appear the packaging part of the facility was damage so they can not put Dies to the plastic packaging.
http://www.techpowerup.com/190121/massive-fire-at-sk-hynix-facility-in-wuxi-china.html
http://chinese.vr-zone.com/81963/sk-hynix-fab-massive-fire-in-wuxi-china-09042013/
Comments
Apple uses multiple suppliers:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/01/micron-completes-2-billion-purchase-of-primary-apple-memory-supplier-elpida/
This isn't quite as bad as the Thailand flooding affecting 40% of HDD supplies. This is one company and one factory. The other 3 companies: Samsung, Toshiba and Micron still have to compete on price with each other.
It may have some effect on pricing and will delay a lot of supplies but I doubt it will have as large an effect as the flooding did to HDD.
And that's ALL that Wall Street needs to see…
Or will see. Because the newspapers won't print ANYTHING else.
Well Hynix is now claiming the damage was not that significant. They said it was in air handling system thus all the smoke in the air and not damage to any fab equipment. However, keep in mind these are clean rooms and now the air handling system was filled with smoke. Not sure I would want to use parts from these facilities until you are assured they got everything cleaned up.
Yeah Apple uses Elpida, but Hynix is still the number DRAM supplier to Apple Elpida was their mobile DRAM supplier.
Only Samsung, Mircon and Hynix and some form Winbond make DRAM, Samsung is not selling to the OEM market at present, Mircon has always been more expensive and Winbond is a small player.
The issue in the industry has been that these supplies have been shifting production from DRAM to NAND so there is already less DRAM production today. The FAB where the fire occurred at Hynix happen in the two FAB which were being switch over from DRAM production to NAND products.