Hynix claims that plant damage is far less than feared

Looks like the plant management at Hynix can breath a large sigh of relief as teams assess damage to the plant and report that it could have been much worse. As the smoke clears, KitGuru holds a damp Kleenex over its mouth and searches the rubble for answers.

We all know a few things about heat and fire.

First, we know that heat rises and second we know that it needs a plentiful supply of air to breath.

Reports from Hynix now seem to indicate that, after the initial explosion, the fire was concentrated in the air purification systems on/near the roof.

Now it seems that Hynix got lucky and the actual damage from the fires will not be as severe as feared.

While installing new equipment, a chemical reaction reportedly caused a huge explosion which led to a fire that did lead to a complete shut down for the production lines.

Bear in mind that this caused an immediate stop in supply for around 15% of the world's DRAM and you can see why panic buying swept through the global IT markets.

Companies like Micron enjoyed stock price bumps of almost 10% at one stage.

While it looked dramatic, the ‘high up' nature of the fire means that the actual FAB machinery appears to have escaped serious damage.

Experts had feared another pricing situation like the one that followed the flooding of Western Digital's main hard drive plant in Thailand, back in 2011. The disaster caused a spike in HDD prices that took almost a year to recover.

KitGuru says: Hynix claims that there is no significant material damage and that it should have FABs 1 and 2 back up and running before global stocks deplete too much.

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