Five Toshiba factories were affected by a strong earthquake in Japan, and brokers expected NAND Flash prices to rise

Japan, June 24 (chinamap) -- Toshiba corp., the world's second largest flash memory supplier, has been shut down for at least five days at its flash memory plant in mie prefecture, Japan, after the power was restored 13 minutes later.

According to chubu electric, the outage occurred at 6:25 p.m. on June 15, and resumed about 13 minutes later.TMC 4-city factory affected by this power failure is the main production plant of NAND flash storage.The production line USES 12-inch (300mm) wafers, mainly for 3d-nand flash storage.

According to the economic daily, Japanese brokerages estimated that the strong earthquake in Japan last week affected production at five factories in miyoki prefecture of Toshiba semiconductor co., and the effect should not be underestimated.Assuming that 50 percent of the wafers were damaged by power outages and another 15 to 20 percent had to be remanufactured, the impact on global NAND supply would be 2 to 3 percent, perhaps even greater if normal production were delayed.This will cause the price of NAND Flash to stop falling for more than eight consecutive quarters, and the second half of the rebound.

In particular, TSMC lost 100, 000 wafers at the start of the year, equivalent to a month's capacity, and lost $550m.

Toshiba memory plans to list on the Tokyo stock market in the second half of 2019 or the first half of 2020.The timing of the IPO will depend on the state of the semiconductor and stock markets.