Massive Fire breaks out at SK Hynix's fabrication plant at Wuxi, China - Memory prices may shoot up!

[Gannu]

A massive fire has broken out at SK Hynix's fabrication facility at Wuxi, China as a result of a chemical explosion. There have been no official reports from the company. One injury has been reported.

Hynix is also one of the major suppliers of flash memory to phone and tablet manufacturers. This may negatively impact the pricing of the devices just as the hard drive prices shot up when Western Digital's Thailand plant was affected by the floods during 2011 monsoons.

This is one of the main factories for nVidia GDDR5 we are told, so expect a major issue for the green team with production and pricing. That said, As nVidia begin to switch to other sources, so AMD’s price for Radeon RAM will also jump up.

Hynix makes 30% of the world’s memory in this area, and now it will lose half its production, so world production will drop by 15%.

All figures are approximate – we are getting news in from our Far East sources as we type.

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[Soyab0007]

Last victim was the harddrives, a flood happened in thailand almost a couple of years ago and
prices over doubled even tripled in some cases. The prices are still recovering and some time next year will they be back to normal. That is over two years recovery time for a flood at just hit one of the worlds harddrive factorys.

If this puts a 10% or more dent in the worlds production of dram and/or nand we are in for a price increase.

Some manufacturers have over capacity in their production but they often choose not to increase production so the can make more money. You could call them evil but they want to take every opportunity to make money and a fire like this is perfect for fueling their greed and lining their pockets with big money.

Seagate did it with harddrives, when WD had problems delivering after the flood seagate raked in big money by keeping the production level and letting the prices go up.