NXP's Austin, Texas plant resumes operations

Affected by the bad weather, the Austin plants of Samsung Electronics, NXP, Infineon and other semiconductor manufacturers have temporarily suspended production upon request, which has made the already scarce chip market worse. However, there have been good news in recent days. On March 11, NXP announced on its official website that the company's wafer manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas, USA resumed initial operations.

Previously, Texas suffered a severe winter storm that caused extensive disruptions in natural gas, electricity, and water. This storm and subsequent public utility losses affected NXP’s two wafer manufacturing plants in Austin and caused the plant to change from Production will be discontinued on February 15th.

The NXP press release pointed out that the local team has restored the affected facilities, the clean room environment is considered safe, and the staff began to return on February 27. Since then, the NXP team has been repairing the damage on site, evaluating the affected system and performing equipment recalibration. Personnel are currently evaluating wafer-level work-in-progress (WIP) to ensure proper product quality.

According to its disclosure, due to the damage caused by the storm, the subsequent loss of utilities and the restart of production, so far, NXP's two wafer manufacturing plants in Austin have lost about one month of wafer production time.

Kurt Sievers, President and CEO of NXP, said that the weather conditions and utility disruptions encountered in Texas last month are indeed unprecedented. He is very pleased that the Austin plant has now resumed initial operations and is now steadily advancing the recovery plan to make The round factory returned to its pre-storm production level.

"We understand that supply disruptions may affect our customers, and we are working hard to achieve full production while maintaining the quality of these complex manufacturing processes. We will continue to provide updated information to affected customers on a regular basis and will work tirelessly to minimize potential Discontinued," Kurt Sievers said.

Currently, NXP believes that this will not have an impact on its previously announced revenue guidance for the first quarter of 2021. In addition, although the company has not provided any financial guidance for the second quarter, it currently expects revenue in the second quarter to reach approximately $100 million. NXP will provide more details on the first quarter results and second quarter expectations at the financial report at the end of April.

It is understood that Samsung's Austin factory also gradually ceased operations at around 1:00 pm on February 16. However, according to media reports, industry analysts estimate that Samsung's Austin factory may not basically recover until mid-April.