Friday, March 26, 2010
A brief power outage at some Samsung Electronics memory chip lines in Gilheung, Gyeonggi Province Wednesday is expected to push up prices of computer and flash memory chips in the short term, analysts said.
But amid a period of tight supply in memory chips, the power cuts could help the overall semiconductor market maintain its current upward trend.
"The global semiconductor market is price-sensitive in terms of supply. The shutdown will indirectly affect the prices of DRAM and NAND flash chips, which we expect will see an additional rise," Choi Seung-jae, an analyst at KTB Investment, Thursday.
Sources at Samsung told The Korea Times that the shutdown caused the world's top memory chip vendor to suffer a loss amounting to "several million dollars."
A Samsung Electronics spokesman said the company was determining the exact amount, but that it was "not significant."
In 2007, the firm was hit by a loss of $54 million due to the shutdown of six of its chip production lines after a power outage at production bases in Giheung, on the outskirts of Seoul. Samsung normalized the lines within 21 hours.
Spot prices for 1 Gb-based DRAM chips were maintaining their $3-per-unit trading level, while DDR2 parts of the same density were around the $3 level, according to DRAMeXchange Technology Inc., the operator of Asia's biggest spot market for semiconductors.
As for NAND flash chips used in high-end digital devices such as mobile phones and camcorders, average spot prices for high-density multi-level cell (MLC) chips were relatively stable, it said.
Since late last year, chip prices were healthy thanks to output cutbacks by cash-strapped players and steady demand for advanced chips amid signs of economic recovery.
Samsung said its 12-inch or 300 millimeters fab-13 and fab-14 products were mostly affected by the one-hour suspension. Monthly capacities at the lines are 120,000 and 130,000 wafers, respectively.
"Right after the brief power outage, Samsung's power supply immediately returned to normal," the company said in a statement.
By: DocMemory
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