How will Japan disasters affect Apple’s iPad and wannabe rivals’ supply chains?

15 years ago

“Apple releases the iPad 2 on Friday and on the very same day a 9.0 earthquake rocks Japan, one of the centers of NAND flash production,” David Morgenstern writes for ZDNet. “What might the fallout from the quake be to Apple’s product availability and rollouts as well as to prices?”

“According to analyst Jim Handy at Objective Anaysis Semiconductor Market Research, a number of Fujitsu and Toshiba manufacturing sites are located near the earthquake epicenter,” Morgenstern reports. “In addition, Tokyo, Kobe and other centers are located on the east coast of Japan… Apple NAND suppliers are not all in Japan. According to iSuppli, Apple is supplied by Toshiba and Samsung as well as other vendors. However, Apple primarily purchases flash memory from ‘top flight’ vendors, such as Samsung and Toshiba. Most of Apple’s DRAM comes from Korean vendors and would be unaffected.”

Morgenstern writes, “As one of the world’s biggest customers for the technology, [Apple] will get its supply before the smaller buyers — even if those ‘smaller’ companies are Hewlett Packard, Motorola and even Samsung. In the manufacturing business, Japanese manufacturing giants and the arms of Korean chaebol conglomerates can’t play in-house favorites. The biggest customer gets first choice. That means that everyone else, big and small will feel the pinch more than Apple. Way more.”