Power outage causes Samsung slowdown, shortage?

When the power goes out in my apartment, I'm usually forced to briefly re-acquaint myself with the primitive, pre-Internet lifestyle of my forefathers. When the power goes out at Samsung's South Korean flash factory, however, things get a tad more serious than simple a bonfire in the living room. As you'll recall, Samsung produces the vast majority of the world's flash memory chips and derives a significant amount of profit from flash sales to OEMs. So you can't blame Samsung for being a little upset when a four-hour power outage shut down the company's main flash plant in Suwon, South Korea for a full 22 hours. Luckily, Sammy had a solid insurance policy in place and should be able to recoup any losses from Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance--which some estimate could be as high as $40 million USD. Some analysts are going so far as to predict that a flash shortage might result from the downtime, though if you ask me, that's a boogeyman that's been disproven one time too many at this point.

For more on the outage:
- see this article from the English edition of the Chosun Ilbo