Contamination that occurred during the production of NAND components at Kioxia’s manufacturing plants caused significant damage to its manufacturing partner, Western Digital. According to information published by the market research company TrendForce, the contamination was discovered about two weeks ago in two factories of the venture, factories that once belonged to Toshiba – and it also damaged the production machines themselves.
According to an initial estimate by Western Digital, it has lost NAND memories of about 6.5 billion gigabytes, but according to TrendForce, the actual damage will be wider because the company has not yet taken into account the silence that may now exist because production lines need to be repaired.
According to the market research company, the combined market share of the venture in the third quarter of 2021 was about 32% of the NAND memory market, so the effect of silencing production lines, and as mentioned, is not clear for how long, will clearly lead to price increases in the current quarter. NAND, and consequently also of the hardware equipment based on them, and especially of SSDs.
TrendForce estimated before the crash that SSD prices fell due to a relatively large representation in the NAND market by 3 to 5%. Now after the glitch they estimate that prices can rise up to 10%, with the main impact being on the consumer market in terms of PCs which also suffer from the problem of supplying processors.