According to Anandtech, Western Digital said on Wednesday that it and its partner Toshiba Memory (TMC) have successfully restored almost all joint venture production lines in Japan's Yokkaichi City Park to normal operations. Damage to wafers and manufacturing equipment will cause Western Digital's losses to reach $339 million.
On June 15, the 13-minute accidental power outage in Yokkaichi, Japan, affected the production equipment jointly operated by Western Digital and TMC. The incident damaged the processed wafers and the company's production facilities. Western Digital said at the end of June that the accident would reduce its NAND wafer supply in the third quarter by approximately 6 EB (exabytes), which would be about half of the company's quarterly NAND supply. Toshiba also confirmed that the wafer and equipment were damaged, but did not elaborate.
Western Digital CEO Steve Milligan said that so far, almost all of the capacity of the Yokkaichi Operations Department has been re-launched. He mentioned, “The Western Digital and TMC teams have been working hard to carry out the repair work. As of now, almost all fab equipment has returned to normal operation.”
Western Digital believes that all lost wafers will be contained in the September quarter, but the losses will be considerable. In the fourth quarter of FY 2019 (2019Q2), the company charged $145 million in affected equipment and operations and plans to write off another $1.7 to $190 million in the September quarter. Therefore, the total impact on Western Digital will reach 3.15 to 339 million US dollars.
On the other hand, TMC did not disclose the impact of the accident, but if it lost the same number of wafers and had to resume production, then the loss of TMC would be comparable to Western Digital. Overall, a 13-minute blackout would cost the two companies $6.3 to $678 million.