According to local Korean media reports, Samsung’s NAND plant in Pyeongtaek suffered a sudden 30-minute power outage on March 9. Although the standby uninterruptible power supply can cope with a sudden situation of about 20 minutes, in the CVD (chemical vapor deposition), diffusion, etching, and ion implantation processes, a 60-minute power outage may affect 60% of input wafers ( That is waiting for the processing of wafers). In general, any outage of more than 20 minutes will result in more than half of the input wafers being scrapped. Due to the power outage in the Pyeongtaek factory, global NAND supply is expected to temporarily tighten in March, and it is expected that the accident will reduce the global NAND inventory level.
Citibank analyzed that Samsung’s 11% NAND capacity in March is expected to be affected. At present, a layer of monthly NAND production capacity of Samsung Pyeongtaek is 90k wafers, and second-tier DRAM/NAND equipment is being installed. Despite the availability of uninterruptible power supplies, it is expected that this power outage will still affect 60% of production capacity. If Samsung NAND's total capacity is 514k/month, it is estimated that 11% of Samsung's NAND chip shipments will be scrapped in March. Currently, the global monthly NAND capacity is 1,557k tablets/month, so it is expected that global NAND supply will drop by 3.5% in March 2018.
However, Samsung has accident insurance, so power outages have limited impact on them. Samsung's memory fabs have all invested in accident insurance. The accidental power outage will result in an insurance claim. Therefore, Samsung’s profits have little effect. In addition, because it has sufficient NAND inventory preparation, it is believed that Samsung's sales and operations will not be affected.
Citibank noted that Samsung is expected to continue its strong growth, driven by server DRAMs using 1xnm and 1ynm. For SK Hynix, it is expected that the strong demand for server DRAM and SSDs in 2018 will enable the company to set a new profit record.
Editor's note: No effect on DRAM temporarily.