A massive fire on Wednesday at a factory in Wuxi, China owned by Korea’s SK Hynix could send flash memory and random-access memory (RAM) prices soaring. Hynix is the world’s second largest memory manufacturer.
According to early reports on Chinese technology news websites and blogs, the fire has forced SK Hynix to suspend all operations at the facility.
Bloomberg reports that the company is still ascertaining if there were any casualties and investigating the cause of the fire. According to the news wire, the fire started at 3.50pm local time.
“Hynix has a 25% global market share in DDR and flash memory,” says David Kan, CEO of JSE-listed computer assembler and technology distributor Mustek.
“At this stage, we don’t know how big the impact will be, but all [memory] suppliers have stopped quoting prices,” Kan says. “We will have a better update and more information in next couple of days.”
He says that, similar to the floods in Thailand in 2011 that had a huge knock-on effect on the price of computer hard drives and their availability, the incident at the SK Hynix factory “could impact the DDR and flash memory market just as significantly”.
“It all depends on how quickly Hynix can resume output,” Kan says. — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media