Since Japan is second to South Korea in importance to the global memory industry, spot price for DRAM and NAND flash products both rose on the first trading day after the March 11 earthquake. In the NAND flash maket, 32Gb MLC chips went up 20.5% in one day, and 16Gb MLC chips gained 16.8%. DRAM spot price, which was previously trending down, also posted a 7% increase for the day...
The earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, the area where the country's major car and parts manufacturing is, will likely cause significant disruptions to the auto industry's global supply chain.
Though several major IC packaging material suppliers have resumed operations at their earthquake-affected plants, there is still growing concern that production will be hampered by the country's damaged infrastructure including transportation systems and electrical grids.
Japan is an important supplier of upstream OLED materials. Sumitomo Chemical and Showa Denko are the main material producers of polymer-based OLED, and Idemitsu Kosan and Mitsui Chemicals are in the small molecules camp. In addition, TDK Micro Device manufactures passive matrix OLED (PMOLED) panels.
With major silicon wafer plants remaining closed following the recent earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, there is growing concern in the memory industry whether chip companies are preparing for any possible disruption to production.
Three major Japan-based suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment have suspended operations at several of their plants in the earthquake-ravaged areas with no timeframe for when they will re-open. Lithography system provider Nikon suffered the most as its main factory sites are located in Miyagi and Tochigi prefectures, areas particularly affected by the disaster.
The global hard disk drive (HDD) industry, already facing challenges from solid state drives (SSDs), cloud computing and limitation of vertical read-write technologies, is expected to face even more challenges resulting from the March 11 earthquake in northeastern Japan, which has severely damaged the plants of local HDD component makers including hard disk maker Showa Denko, and HDD-use...
Looking at TFT LCD equipment supply, although South Korea has improved its own equipment production capability in recent years, it still relies heavily on Japan for PECVD, sputter units and steppers.
The impact the Japan earthquake has on photovoltaic (PV) inverters will be determined by the supply of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) since Japan represents 30% of global production output. An IGBT shortage caused inverter shipments delays in 2010, and the earthquake has brought supply of the key component back to the spotlight...
