Taiwan Earthquake Impacts TSMC Production

The 6.4-magnitude natural disaster on February 6 killed 116 people, with significant damage to a ton of manufacturing facilities.

Initially, TSMC indicated that the natural disaster would only result in about a 1% decrease in production in 2016.

An quake on February 6 hit southern Taiwan where TSMC’s Fab 6, 14A and 14B are located. With these supposed advantages, TSMC has reportedly bumped off Samsung from the A10 manufacturing slot. Fab 6 is an 200mm wafer foundry manufacturing 70,000 wspm (wafer starts per month) using mature processes such as 130nm. A DigiTimes report confirmed that machines at TSMC’s Fab 6 and Fab 14B units have been restored.

“We will make every effort and work closely with customers to expedite the delivery of all impacted wafers”, TSMC said in the statement. The Company now expects first quarter revenue to be between NT$201 billion to NT$203 billion. Otherwise, no equipment or facilities were damage, nothing shifted, and the sites are expected to be at normal production with “two to three days”. In a bid to minimize the impact of earthquakes, the STSP administration will cooperate with the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering under the government-sponsored National Applied Research Laboratories to set up an earthquake early warning system and disaster information and analysis mechanism.

TSMC has been one of the major chip manufacturers for Apple’s products along with Samsung but the Taiwanese company managed to secure an edge over the South Korean giant when it struck the iPhone 7 deal with Apple. Which meant long-term production impact would be around 1% of 2016 production.