From Tom's Hardware: NAND flash prices could reverse their decline in the next quarter, according to DRAMeXchange, which said on Friday that Toshiba's production base still hasn't resumed normal operations after a June 15 power outage. Decreased output from Toshiba's fabs is expected to lead to higher quotes for wafers in the short-term, as well as price increases for 2D and 3D NAND in Q3 2019.
Fab 2, Fab 3, Fab 4, Fab 5 and Fab 6 were affected by the 13-minute power outage in June. That might not seem like a long time, but for companies as large as Toshiba, even the smallest delay can lead to supply issues months down the line. Western Digital announced on June 28 that it expects its flash wafer availability to decline by six exabytes, or 1 billion gigabytes, as a result of the power outage.
DRAMeXchange expects the 2D NAND market to feel this decline in wafer availability the most. The popularization of 3D NAND has led many companies to keep less 2D NAND in their inventories, so they don't have large reserves to fall back on in the power outage's wake. The research firm now "expects some impetus for suppliers to raise quotes on 2D NAND products" Q3 2019 as a result.
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