Hurricane Helene may have an unexpected impact on the chip sector. A small town in North Carolina called Spruce Pines produces a significant portion of the quartz needed to make semiconductors. The storm devastated the town and halted mining operations. Peter Hanbury, Bain & Company partner, and leader of operations for technology practice, joins Josh Schafer and Madison Mills on Market Domination Overtime to discuss the potential impact on chipmakers. “The situation in North Carolina has the potential to have a big impact on the industry if it lasts for more than six months… The high-purity quartz produced is really critical to the industry in two ways. It helps produce the silicon wafers that form the basis of all semiconductor products, and it’s also used in the wafer manufacturing tools used by TSMC (TSM), Intel (INTC), and Micron (MU).” Supply bottlenecks are “one of the challenges of the industry” since there are limited options for chipmakers to find the resources needed to produce the tech. Hanbury says, “The best players in the industry recognize these bottlenecks and spend a lot of time identifying where these bottlenecks are, developing proactive mitigation plans like additional inventory and monitoring their supply base.” Hanbury reports, “We see several months of inventory along the value chain, which will limit the immediate impact… We don’t know the exact impact of the damage or how long it will take to get the facilities up and going again, but we think there’s at least a couple of months of inventory to limit the immediate impact.”
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