Text/Shanshan Xu
On the evening of the 16th local time, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake occurred in the sea near Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In addition to causing more than 100 casualties, Japan's electric power, communications, transportation and manufacturing industries are currently affected to varying degrees.
According to comprehensive Japanese media reports, japan's Miyagi Prefecture and Fukushima Prefecture caused about 30,000 power outages due to earthquakes. Affected by the power outage, the internal power of the Fukushima Prefectural Communication Base Station was exhausted, and the network was disconnected in some areas.
More notably, the impact of the earthquake is also spreading to semiconductor and automotive-related production activities.
The "shock" of automotive semiconductors
Every strong earthquake in Japan will almost affect the nerves of the global semiconductor and downstream industries.
Japan has cultivated a number of industry giants in the field of semiconductor materials and equipment, and companies including Murata and Renesas also hold the lifeblood of global automotive semiconductor supply.
Renesas is the world's largest supplier of automotive MCUs, with a market share of 19% in 2020; Murata is a leading MLCC player with a global market share of more than 30%.
THE MLCC provides surge protection for ECU sensors and eliminates EMI noise from ECU power supplies. As the automotive industry accelerates the transformation of electrification and intelligence, the use of bicycle ECUs continues to increase, and MLCC has also entered a new period of growth.
However, due to the extremely strict requirements of high-precision semiconductor equipment for micro-vibration, air quality and other conditions, the characteristics of Japan's multi-seismic have become one of the biggest variables affecting semiconductor supply.
The earthquake area is concentrated in the eastern part of Japan, where many semiconductor companies have factories.
At present, Renesas has suspended operations at the Nake plant and the Takasaki plant, and said that the resumption time of the plant will be determined "depending on the status of the equipment." In addition, the Yonezawa plant, which was shut down immediately after the earthquake, has restarted some production after inspection.
Four of Murata's factories have been affected and equipment inspections are still underway. Among them, a fire broke out at the Dongmei City factory in Miyagi Prefecture, and although the fire has been extinguished, the cause of the fire and the damage to the equipment are still being investigated. It is reported that the factory is mainly responsible for the production of inductors required for mobile phones and cars.
In terms of ARMOR, its products cover smart phones, data centers and automotive memory products. Although some of the production equipment in the Kitakami factory stopped working, Jiaoxia stressed that there was no pause in memory production.
The "black swan" went away and came back
In the past two years, the semiconductor industry has suffered several black swan events. Rare snowstorms in Texas, China, severe drought in Taiwan, earthquakes and fires in Japan...
Under the action of this series of factors, the upstream semiconductor production encountered obstacles and gradually transmitted to the downstream manufacturing and production links such as mobile phones and automobiles. To this day, automakers still cite "missing cores" as one of the reasons for restricting sales.
Here we have to mention Renesas' Nake factory.
In the 2011 "311 earthquake", the Nake factory stopped production for about three months, and although the anti-seismic measures were gradually improved, a fire last year brought down a factory building in charge of producing car MCUs for nearly a month.
There is no doubt that the impact of Renesas' suspension of production on the supply chain is obvious in the already missing core environment. This is also an important reason why japan's strong earthquake will attract the attention of all parties.
Denso also said the earthquake damaged some equipment at the Fukushima plant. Denso was born out of Toyota Motor's Electrical Parts Division and is currently the world's second-largest automotive parts supplier after Bosch in Germany. Toyota is one of its main customers.
Toyota was also one of the victims of the Fukushima earthquake.
It is reported that Toyota has a number of factories in the tohoku region of Japan, including the Iwate Plant, the Miyagi Daipei Plant, and the Miyagi Yamato Plant, which have now been suspended. However, according to the official statement, whether the night shift on the 17th resumes production depends on the situation.
Earlier, Toyota told its suppliers that in the three months starting in April, Domestic production in Japan would be reduced by up to 20 percent from previous plans. No one expected that the "reduction in production" would come so quickly.
In contrast, production at Nissan's Iwaki plant in Fukushima Prefecture, Tochigi Prefecture's Tochigi Plant, and Kanagawa Prefecture's Opama plant were not affected.
In any case, the fragility of the automotive industry chain is once again highlighted in one day. When it's unclear how much of an impact the earthquake will have, preventing the earthquake may be the best thing to do.