Stock Disruptions Expected as AKM Factory in Japan Burns

We unfortunately have some bad news regarding the high-end Japanese chipmaker Asahi Kasei Microsystems, or as we all know them, “AKM.”

On October 20, a fire began at the AKM manufacturing facility in Japan and grew out of control, ultimately burning for 82 hours before it was extinguished on October 23. The fire was devastating and the entire semiconductor facility is now shut down and all AKM production has come to a halt.

That this is bad news for the audiophile community would be putting it mildly. AKM is one of the most popular chips used in many high-end DACs and Amps, many of which audio dealers sells.

This news is par for the course when it comes to calamitous events in 2020, but we are glad to hear that there were no reported fatalities from the employees who were working inside the AKM facility at the time the fire broke out.

AKM states that it will take them six months until production is online again for their chips, putting the restart date for manufacturing at the end of April 2021 (presuming that this estimate holds and is not further delayed).

As a result of this production shortage, the prices for the existing global inventory of AKM chips is skyrocketing.

We are expecting shortages of products that carry AKM chips as the vendors’ cost-of-production may be too high for them to make large quantities of product.