As beforehand talked about, Samsung’s semiconductor plant in Austin, Texas (right here referred as Samsung Austin) was affected operationally by a extreme winter storm that blanketed your entire state final month. As a consequence, manufacturing actions on the plant have been principally suspended from mid-February to March 2. TrendForce’s investigation of this incident finds that the plant is beginning to get better operationally. Even so, the capability utilization fee of the entire plant will not be anticipated to return to the extent of above 90% till the tip of March, and this delay has had a palpable influence on Samsung’s chip manufacturing. With regards to product combine, there isn’t a wafer enter for NAND Flash at Samsung Austin. Nevertheless, 10% of its manufacturing capability is used to fabricate in-house controller ICs for Samsung’s personal branded SSDs. TrendForce’s investigation additionally finds that almost all controller ICs made at Samsung Austin are for shopper SSDs shipped to PC OEMs. In explicit, amongst Samsung’s shopper SSD choices, merchandise based mostly on 128L NAND Flash are anticipated to be immediately affected by the incident.
It must be identified that, after kicking off mass manufacturing of 128L shopper SSDs in 4Q20, Samsung initially deliberate to make the most of the discharge of Intel’s Tiger Lake CPUs to broaden Samsung’s market share of PCIe G4 SSDs by way of aggressive pricing. After all, its rivals have been sluggish in ramping up manufacturing of PCIe G4 SSDs as a result of unfavourable influence of the pandemic and as a result of longer-than-expected qualification course of from PC OEMs. In gentle of the scarcity of controller ICs, nonetheless, all SSD producers are actually compelled to increase the lead instances for his or her SSD orders, making it troublesome for any producer to extend their provide of SSDs and compelling them to in flip increase 2Q21 costs of shopper SSDs.
On the opposite hand, the ability outage has had an influence on enterprise SSD costs as properly, since enterprise SSDs and shopper SSDs are extremely correlated when it comes to costs. Furthermore, purchasers within the knowledge heart section are anticipated to ramp up their procurement actions for enterprise SSDs in 2Q21 after the earlier bearish interval, that means there’ll seemingly be successive QoQ will increase within the quantity of enterprise SSD orders going ahead. Enterprise SSD costs are due to this fact anticipated to enter an impending upturn, and TrendForce has in flip revised up its forecast of enterprise SSD costs for 2Q21 from a 0-5% lower QoQ to a 0-5% enhance QoQ as an alternative.
