Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Chip prices rise after Japan earthquake

The worldwide PC industry is now feeling the tremor of Japan’s 9.0 magnitude earthquake. As Japan is one of largest chip suppliers in the world, post Japan earthquake, prices of NAND flash memory and DRAM rose sharply.

The price of NAND flash memory shot up as much as 20 percent since the earthquake hit Japan. Another type of chip, called DRAMeXchange, that provides assistance to NAND and DRAM also observed a price rise.

According to Jim Handy at Objective Analysis, Japan currently supplies as much as 40 percent of the world's NAND flash chips.

Top Japanese chip suppliers assured that their factories have not been affected by this earthquake and they would not suffer from electric blackouts.

Toshiba, one of the largest NAND suppliers in the world said that it has only one factory at the northeastern part where the earthquake and tsunami caused damage. The factory’s operation had been stopped as soon as the earthquake hit and it remained so.

IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, said that due to the earth quake there will be supply shortages resulting into price rise. Companies are finding it very difficult to ship their components, collecting raw materials and getting workers to the factories and power outages are slowing down productions causing a “major impact” on day-to-day operations. It said that prices of electronic components such as NAND flash memory, dynamic random access memory (DRAM), microcontrollers, standard logic, liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels, and LCD parts and materials would rise.

Related article:

International Business Times

Computer World

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