Power cut at Samsung's DRAM factory, will its price go up?

A minute without electricity caused chaos in the factory

The electrical failure took place on December 31, 2019 on the occasion of a regional power supply failure, and although the cut only lasted a minute, Samsung will take up to two days to return to normal in its production chain (in other words, surely today they will be back to full production). This cut caused chaos in the factory, with stopped machines and workers without knowing what to do.

Actually, for a semiconductor factory, a power outage can be fatal because they would have several wafers in production that will have become garbage, and restarting machines normally is a process that must be done quite carefully and in a very methodical process that does not lead to possible errors. They do not exaggerate when they say that it may take them two days to return to normal.

To tell the truth, and being a giant like Samsung that will surely be aware of the consequences of an electrical failure, we do not understand how they may not have auxiliary power systems for cases like this (like in hospitals without going any further). The fact is that at this time they still do not have an estimate of the cost that the damages caused by the cut will have for the company, not only for the material that will not serve but for the one that they will stop producing until they return to normal. As a comparison, when the power went out for 30 minutes in 2018, losses were estimated at more than 43 million dollars.

The cut could have an impact on the price of RAM

Well, really from the RAM and storage devices of the brand. In the end, the loss of production always ends up having an impact on the end user, since it is we who "pay". Logically Samsung will want mitigate losses that this power cut will produce them, so some analysts are already creating alarms because they expect the price of the brand's products to rise. Look how things are … for a minute without electricity in a single Samsung DRAM factory.

Anyway, until now everything is pure speculation (and you can imagine what some alarmist market analysts are like) and until the company does not issue an official statement explaining what happened and estimating the losses we cannot have anything for sure.