What could stop millions of smart phones from being shipped?
by Leo Mirani at Quartz
It was an industrial mishap barely noticed outside the arcane world of electronics supply chains. On Sept. 4, a fire engulfed a substantial portion of an SK Hynix production plant in Wuxi, China. The plant produced between a tenth and a sixth of the world’s supply of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), a sort of memory chip used in all computing electronics from laptop computers to mobile phones. Hynix is the world’s second-largest maker of the stuff, supplying everybody from Apple and Dell to Lenovo and Sony.
So how bad was the disruption? The effects of the fire were instant: the spot price of a benchmark unit of 2-gigabit DRAM jumped some 20% to $1.90 the following day, a three-year high. Prices show no sign of retreating. According to Trendforce, a research firm, the shipment of some 10 million smartphones and 11 million laptops could be affected within a month.
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