Samsung’s looming walkout is turning a tight DRAM market into a potential mess.
The firm has halted LPDDR4 production and will only fulfil existing LPDDR4 orders, leaving customers “high and dry” if they were hoping to place new ones.
Samsung management appears dug in over a bonus dispute with unionised workers, with an 18-day strike threat set to start on 21 May and run until 7 June.
Workers are demanding 15 per cent of Samsung’s annual operating profit in bonuses, a figure the report puts at about $30 billion.
A rally on 23 April pulled in as many as 40,000 people, with the union later claiming output fell 18.4 per cent at highly mechanised memory fabs and 58.1 per cent on more labour-intensive foundry lines.
Chip production does not bounce back the moment people clock in again, because paused setup and maintenance can turn restart into a slow crawl.
If the strike runs for 18 days, the industry fears a 36-day production blackout while equipment and lines are brought back to normal.
That kind of stoppage would hit high-performance server DRAM and enterprise SSD products especially hard, right when the wider market is already twitchy.
Samsung could be staring at losses of 30 trillion won ($20 billion), which is about €17.4 billion.
