Blackout caused flash spot price increase

We have reported last week that due to the sudden voltage drop in the early morning of December 8th in Japan's power supply network in Yokkaichi, although it took only 0.07 seconds, it caused the Toshiba fab to suspend production all the way, and did not resume production until Dec. 10. Coupled with the scrapping of a large number of semi-finished products on the production line at the time, Toshiba has estimated that its production in January and February 2011 will therefore drop by nearly 20%.

The news from the Taiwan market today that the impact of the accident on global flash market prices has begun to show. In the spot market, the price of NAND flash memory chips went up 3% to 4%, of which 16Gb granules price reached 4.26 US dollars, 32Gb granules reached 5.18 US dollars, 8Gb and 64Gb chip prices also have a slight increase.

Since Toshiba is the world’s second-largest supplier of NAND flash memory, its output has dropped by 10% to 20%, which will cause global flash memory supply to drop by 3.5% to 7%. It is expected that the trend of price increase will continue to expand in January and February of next year.

Currently, smart phones are the world’s largest consumers of NAND flash, and SSDs and tablets will also become the main force for flash memory usage next year. Although demand has been rising, due to the production of Samsung and Toshiba's new production lines, NAND flash memory may still experience oversupply in the second half of next year, and price cuts will be inevitable at that time.