Japan Quake Also Affects NAND Flash Market

It appears that the worldwide market for NAND Flash memory chips did not get away unscathed after the natural disaster that struck Japan last week and left very serious problems in its wake.

No doubt people will have already learned of the natural disaster that took place in Japan last week, namely an 8.9-magnitude earthquake that shook the earth and sent great tsunamis upon the island nation.

About 10,000 people or more are expected to have died and many have been stranded without food and water for days.

Meanwhile, an oil refinery caught fire because of the tremors, though the real problem is with a certain power plant where nuclear reactors were damaged by explosions, though they haven't exactly suffered meltdown (yet).

Either way, the situation is dire and has far-reaching consequences, especially in the form of power outages.

That said, the NAND Flash market is forced to deal with supply concerns because of all these issues, plus damaged production facilities.

Since Toshiba is stationed in Japan, there might be serious repercussions if it has to halt its activities for long, although the outfit has yet to say exactly how much it suffered from the incident.

Production in Yokkaichi should have survived without much consequences, but Toshiba's overall activities were still set back about 48,000 wafers because of a brief outage on March 8.

It is unclear just what happened then, but the event on March 11 definitely can't be said to have helped matters much.

It stands to note that the last time Toshiba suffered a power outage (December 2010), it caused January and February shipments to fall 20%.

Fortunately, SanDisk should have managed to get away with just minor problems so the overall NAND market won't be completely destabilized. Nevertheless, the fact is that this sort of memory will most likely end up in tight supply.