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Massive Blackout Hits Taiwan's Industry

2017/08/17 | By Alan Lu

The massive blackout on August 15 in Taiwan, which hit business segments and millions of households around the island, has caused different level of loss and malfunction to the corporations and plants in Taiwan.

With its K21 and K22 plants forced to suspend production for nearly 60 minutes due to the blackout, ASE Group, world's largest semiconductor testing and packaging company headquartered in southern Taiwan, said that they are calculating the actual loss caused by this outage, and will restore the production as soon as possible.

Planning to restore the full operation on Wednesday, ChipMOS, another large-sized semiconductor testing and packaging firm, reported a 2-hour shutdown of its plants in Zhubei and Southern Taiwan Science Park.

TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor foundry headquartered in Taiwan, said that the power-cut did not bring a large impact on its' operation, confirming that its' plants in Hsinchu Science Park, Central Taiwan Science Park, and Southern Taiwan Science Park remained operational as usual during the Tuesday massive blackout.

On another front, production lines of HonHai, the world's largest EMS (electronic manufacturing service) provider by size, and Largan Precision, a globally prestigious supplier of camera lens modules, all were impervious from the Tuesday outage.

Luckily, the large-scale power-cut did not affect Hsinchu Science Park, where a number of Taiwan's major tech firms set up production, including Nanya, AUO, Winbond, and etc.

Sam Lin, director of the Allied Association for Science Park Industries and the chairman of Weltrend semiconductor Inc., however, thinks that the government still owes the citizens an apology and proper explanation as the massive block-out without alarm has left foreign investors even more worried about if Taiwan has the ability to secure its electricity supply.

Sam Lin, director of the Allied Association for Science Park Industries and the chairman of Weltrend semiconductor Inc. (photo provided by UDN).
Sam Lin, director of the Allied Association for Science Park Industries and the chairman of Weltrend semiconductor Inc. (photo provided by UDN).