Last Friday, a power outage caused by a switchboard malfunction on a substation transformer forced five lines at Samsung's NAND flash memory plant and one line at their SoC plant to halt production. The world's largest memory chipmaker said it that expected total damage from the incident to be about $43 million.
The company resumed normal operations on Saturday and said it plans to increase productivity to meet production targets. Samsung rejected early analysts' predictions that the incident could wipe out as much as a month's worth of Samsung's total output of NAND flash memory chips, which are widely used in portable gadget such as digital cameras and music players
"Some of the wafers that were being processed when the outage hit can be salvaged, and the potential yield from the recovered wafers was at a good level," said Choi Chang-sik, executive vice president at Samsung's semiconductor business, at a news conference in Kiheung.
There was also a worry that a flash memory shortage prompted by the power outage would cause NAND memory prices to rise. This will not be the case, according to Samsung, because they had maintained stockpiles of chips for their main clients, which include Nokia and Apple.