https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-shakes-up-pro-audio-industry

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In the wake of a massive three-day fire at the Nobeoka City factory of semiconductor producer Asahi Kasei Microsystems (AKM), pro-audio manufacturers around the globe are now facing anticipated shortages of crucial DAC and ADC chips used in their products.

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The AKM fire broke out at the semiconductor manufacturing plant on Tuesday, October 20, and took three days to put out. While no one was hurt, reportedly 400 employees were evacuated when it began. Parts of the building structure, including sections of walls and the roof, collapsed on October 22 after another fire broke out on the factory’s fifth floor.

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Ultimately, the blaze was extinguished around midnight on October 23, a full 82 hours after it began. According to IC industry news site SemiMedia, the entire factory is now offline and is expected to take a minimum of six months to restore production.

Chinese semiconductor distributor CGoC Industrial Electronics publicly noted that it expects various AKM DAC series (AK4332, AK4331, AK4432, AK4382, AK4385, AK4373, AK4396, AK4431, AK4456, AK4490, AK4493, AK4495) and possibly ADC series (AK5384, AK5385, AK5386, AK5397, AK5534) to be affected, but in fact, the factory produced far more than that.

“Every AKM part we use—ADCs, DACs, ASRCs and Receivers—is made exclusively in the Nobeoka plant,” said Millennia’s La Grou. “Of course, all AKM audio parts immediately disappeared from front-line distributors [such as] Digikey, Mouser, etc. And now the after-market brokers are selling AKM parts at horrific mark-ups. We saw one $5 AKM part being offered at $110 each.”