Chip Makers Suffered Pre-Quake Outage in Japan
By Don Clark
SanDisk and Toshiba make flash-memory chips at two jointly owned factories in Japan, which were far enough away from the Mar. 11 earthquake to escape physical damage and also dodged the rolling blackouts that followed. But the companies still have had their share of power problems.
- Bloomberg News
SanDisk noted Thursday that one of the factories suffered a power outage three days before the earthquake, for unrelated reasons. That factory was in the process of returning to normal output at the time of the quake, which temporarily disrupted operations at both factories, the company said.
Such interruptions are no joke–often causing companies to scrap partly processed silicon wafers and pay other costs to get production tools up and running again. SanDisk said during its earnings call that both factories had fully recovered by Mar. 13, but noted the disruptions will lead to a $25 million charge.
What makes the situation more unusual is that the same factories experienced a similar problem in December, when Toshiba said a split-second interruption in power effectively required the factories to reboot. SanDisk took an $18 million charge following that outage.
One analyst during the call questioned SanDisk management about the frequency of the outages, and asked what the company is doing to try to prevent them. Sanjay Mehotra, SanDisk’s chief executive, stressed that the two events were quite different; the first was an interruption in electricity that came from the power grid that was outside the companies’ control, while the second was a “human operator error” associated with maintenance at the factories.
Mehotra said the company has installed equipment to help limit such externally caused problems, and changed processes and training to limit glitches caused by internal factors.
Still, the successive outages at the Japan site surprised longtime watchers of the semiconductor industry. “That is a real oddity in the manufacturing space,” said Risto Puhakka, an analyst at VLSI Research, which specializes on the sector. “It doesn’t lend a lot of credibility, to be frank.”
On a more positive note, SanDisk is optimistic about avoiding future problems in the wake of the quake such as shortages of silicon wafers and other supplies. “Our teams have been working very aggressively to ensure that we line up alternative sources of different materials or chemicals where need,” said Judy Bruner, the company’s executive vice president of administration and chief financial officer, in an interview.
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