Western Digital said it has lost at least 6.5 billion gigabytes of NAND flash due to chemical contamination issues at its manufacturing facilities. That’s roughly 13% of the total chip share in three months, according to research firm TrendForce, which could lead to a sharp rise in prices for NAND chips, the main component of solid state drives. And this, in turn, will affect the PC market over the next few months, which is already going through hard times in terms of component costs.
Contamination of materials used in manufacturing processes was discovered in late January at two factories in Japan owned by Western Digital and Kioxia. The latter is a partner and the largest supplier of flash memory in the world. Both companies own 30% of the market and supply SSD drives and eMMC memory modules to most manufacturers of computers and other electronics. Accordingly, in the near future there will be problems with the supply of these components.
The funny thing is that last month TrendForce announced an oversupply of consumer SSDs in the first quarter of this year. Analysts predicted a decline in value by 3-10%. The same was true for eMMC, UFS and NAND memory. The cost of these chips should have been reduced by 3-13%. Now they say that prices at best can decrease slightly only due to sufficient stocks, and already in the second quarter there will be a shortage and a rise in prices. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the manufacturing process of memory chips takes up to three months. In addition, Western Digital may hide the exact number of damaged chips.
Source: Trash Box
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