Earthquake and Screens

Sponge Bob

Most televisions use a limited range of LCD / LED and Plasma scrrens produced in giant factories in Japan and Korea. I understand that the earthquake has affected the main Panasonic LCD Screen plant in Mobara Japan ....requiring some recalibrations at a minimum but not their new plant further south in Himeji. I don't know what screens come from what.

Sony/Samsungs are made in Korea while some recent Sony/Sharp screens come from Sakai in the south which is unaffected.

Any other news of supply disruptions, especially in screens, post here. There should not be any major electrical problem in Japan. They have lost around 4000Mw of Generation capacity with 6-8 reactors closed in the 500Mw range each but this is only a few % of total generation capacity...perhaps 3-4% and an equal amount of demand has ...frankly :rolleyes:...been washed away

I also heard that some car parts will be very hard to get, dunno which. Nissan ( Renault ??) Honda Subaru and to a lesser extent Toyota all have parts manufacturing operations in the affected areas.

John mac

Himeji started producing in April 2010 making lcd panels

The plant currently manufactures 32 and 42-inch IPS-a panels, producing 405,000 panels per month (building to 810,000 this month) and shipping them to Panasonic’s flat panel TV assembly sites around the world.

The panel production here at Himeji is just for the IPS-a panel on 7 production lines.

Turbulent Bill

Sponge Bob wrote: »

There should not be any major electrical problem in Japan. They have lost around 4000Mw of Generation capacity with 6-8 reactors closed in the 500Mw range each but this is only a few % of total generation capacity...perhaps 3-4% and an equal amount of demand has ...frankly :rolleyes:...been washed away

The 'demand' which has been washed away includes thousands of dead Japanese. Cheap gags have no place here, and I'm sure panel supply issues are pretty low on the list of peoples' concerns (even on the TV forums).

What an utterly heartless way of describing a disaster.

lucernarian

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Most televisions use a limited range of LCD / LED and Plasma scrrens produced in giant factories in Japan and Korea. I understand that the earthquake has affected the main Panasonic LCD Screen plant in Mobara Japan ....requiring some recalibrations at a minimum but not their new plant further south in Himeji. I don't know what screens come from what.

Sony/Samsungs are made in Korea while some recent Sony/Sharp screens come from Sakai in the south which is unaffected.

Any other news of supply disruptions, especially in screens, post here. There should not be any major electrical problem in Japan. They have lost around 4000Mw of Generation capacity with 6-8 reactors closed in the 500Mw range each but this is only a few % of total generation capacity...perhaps 3-4% and an equal amount of demand has ...frankly :rolleyes:...been washed away

I also heard that some car parts will be very hard to get, dunno which. Nissan ( Renault ??) Honda Subaru and to a lesser extent Toyota all have parts manufacturing operations in the affected areas.

I understand that much of Japan's capacity in producing and importing the very fuel required for the (now increased) use of conventional thermal plants has been damaged. Would this prove to be the bigger energy production issue in the earthquake aftermath??

Stinicker

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

I understand that much of Japan's capacity in producing and importing the very fuel required for the (now increased) use of conventional thermal plants has been damaged. Would this prove to be the bigger energy production issue in the earthquake aftermath??

Yes one of their biggest losses has been their refining capacity and as a result the country is getting rolling blackouts. It will no doubt be used by the hedge funds as yet another excuse to jack up oil prices.

Alot of Japanese companies are effected however I have no doubt they will get back on their feet soon and rebuild and do what they have to do and I can't see them being like Haiti where they are dying daily and living in tribal wild communities.

Sponge Bob

Stinicker wrote: »

Yes one of their biggest losses has been their refining capacity and as a result the country is getting rolling blackouts. It will no doubt be used by the hedge funds as yet another excuse to jack up oil prices.

They have 3 grids, the eastern one is the one affected by the quake/tsunami/loss of generation plant and the Hokkaido grid to the north is unaffected as is the Western Grid which starts a few miles west of Tokyo.

They have insufficient interconnnection between grids to make up for this power shortfall on the eastern grid much less a surplus to export across these interconnections.

However the picture in the western media of endemic power blackouts is wrong, most of Japan by area and population is unaffected and there are no disruptions whatsoever. eg Toyota City is served by the western grid...whether that applies to its parts suppliers is another matter of course.

Alot of Japanese companies are effected however I have no doubt they will get back on their feet soon and rebuild

Of course they will, in time. I do remember what the Kobe Earthquake did to chip supplies in the 1990s ..even though semiconductor plants were not in themselves seriously affected. There were only 2 plants in the world that prducted the brown/grey resin that all chips are covered in and one was in Kobe. All we need to find out is that every LCD in the world, no matter where, relies on a 'pixie dust' made in this affected area to seed the crystals.

All will be known by the end of this week.

OldRio

Dear God,

I forgot all about the plasma screens. With the earthquake, tsunami, tragic loss of life and nuclear disaster I forgot all about the screen situation.

FFS.

Sponge Bob

Reuters have a scoping article.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/idINIndia-55592020110315

The largest supplier of LCD Glass is Corning and their plant is west of Tokyo on the Western GRID , However while Nippon Electric Glass have a Plant near Tokyo in Fujisawa they are a smaller player. Corning announced yesterday that they should be OK.

A More Indepth version of the Reuters report is available on Barrons

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052970204011504576200591621912966.html?mod=BOLFeed

Netting this all out, we expect some disruption in the LCD-supply chain, including impact from passive components and chips used in the final assembly process across LCD TVs, notebooks, desktop PCs and handheld devices.
We expect passive components (e.g., capacitors, lithium ion batteries) and semiconductors (e.g., NAND flash, etc.) supply to be impacted

On the face of it not a massive impact. Checking for semiconductor/mpeg4 chip disruptions now.

Sponge Bob

Got a PM saying that Sony manufacture their professional TV gear in the affected area eg Digital Betacams and that led to my finding an article that indicates that anything containing a Toshiba Semiconductor component...eg an MPEG4 chipset or NAND Flash memory could be in short supply rather soon.

http://www.hqew.net/Article/Details.aspx?ID=77

Toshiba's NAND factory and factory are located in the CMOS sensor (CMOS sensor would have to supply), while Toshiba is the second largest manufacturers of NAND, so the earthquake is able to drive the semiconductor chip prices skyrocketing, especially in memory chips.

NAND is what is used in SD Cards and USB Sticks, however Samsung is a big supplier too.

Polysilicon Base supply will be constrained

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110315PD208.html

Spot Memory prices rose 20% yesterday, keep an eye on that one. Onything with solid state memory rather than disk based storage will be affected.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110315PD213.html

prices may rise....as much as 50% this week

But no show stopper announcement ....so far.