Like all organizations in the semiconductor industry, SEMI has been impacted by the devastating earthquake in Japan. While our people are safe, they are having difficulties with the transportation infrastructure in Japan and coping with many personal hardships and, in some cases, loss of friends and/or family. The Sendai region was home to many important SEMI member company facilities. Our Japan Board members were also unable to attend our recent Board of Directors meeting in China, focusing on the many personal and business challenges this extreme event has produced. Many of our Japan staff are working with members "on the ground" to assist with disaster recovery, including exploring logistics and shipping alternatives and consulting.
An important consideration for SEMI has been how to serve our members with communications and information. We have explored a number of options and have chosen to focus on aggregating public announcements on earthquake impact status from SEMI members in Japan and in other important SEMI members. You can see a sample of this effort currently posted on the SEMI home page here.
There has been significant, and in some cases hasty, speculation on the impacts to NAND memory, silicon wafer shipments, packaging material resins, capital equipment, and other areas. The news media is doing as good a job as they can in identifying and evaluating these issues for their readers. Before any accurate industry assessment can be made, however, aftershocks need to decline in frequency and severity and the electrical power service needs to be restored. SEMI does not feel it productive to add to the speculation by facilitating, contributing or accelerating what may be poor information. Our friends and colleagues in Japan need to do their work first before a full assessment of the demand and supply issues can be fully examined.
I hope you agree with our approach to aggregate authorized information directly from SEMI members, rather than contribute to an incomplete and premature discussion of the earthquake's impact. There will be time for that soon enough.
If you have any advice or comments on how you or SEMI can contribute to the earthquake relief and industry response effort, please drop me note.
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1 comment:
Nice note from Dan Hutcheson on our Earthquake response.
Stan and all the SEMI staff,
It’s times like these where the quality of your organization really shines.
SEMI is the first industry association to send such a notice out.
It’s not only compassionate, it gives people access to facts.
And by the looks of it, it clearly took lots of work to put together.
Stan, I don’t know what we would do without SEMI.
With so many out there trying to fan the fires for media coverage,
It’s great to see a voice of calm, giving people access to the facts.
As you may know, I have tried to do the same.
If you would like to send the report I wrote on the earthquake to your members, I am happy to donate it for free.
I have attached the PDF.
Meanwhile, keep up the good work and thank you!
Dan Hutcheson
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