X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview (page 8)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

Under such conditions, those manufacturers who have better negotiating skills will win, not those with the biggest production facilities. So the market shares may change somewhat. So far, according to the third quarter results, summarized by Dataquest, Samsung’s inevitably declining market share shrunk from 35.6% to 27% in the first three quarters. That’s quite indecent for so short a term. And it’s not quite clear why. Well, it may be that the company that always knows which way the wind blows has transferred some of its lines to flash. The other plausible version is that the competitors’ activities made the company’s share in the South Pacific market decline, which resulted in the shrinkage of the total share.

Anyway, Samsung remains the leader with its 27%, followed by Micron that maintained its share throughout the year – from 18.3 to 18.4%. Of course, Micron cannot go much higher, but Samsung may meet it continuing its downward movement. Micron is doing its utmost to earn money (but not to expand the chip production). Particularly, they have started building a new plant for producing and testing memory modules, including DDR-II.

If there’s a company to aspire for the world’s first place, it is Infineon that has managed to grow from 9.2 to 16.6% in three quarters. This is partly due to the company’s advancement in China where it is at equals with Samsung already. Characteristically, the last quarter was the first profitable for the German company in two years – €49 million with a sales volume of €1.75 billion. Computer memory accounts for €765 million of the total, that’s 75% more than in the nine months of the last year and 34% above the showings of the second quarter. That’s what I call progress.

“Hynix” and “progress” are two words that rarely meet in one sentence nowadays, but even this company managed to keep its market share and even enlarge it from 11.4% to 14.9%. It’s very close to the third place in the world rank list. November Hynix was reported to consider licensing its 0.11-micron technology of DRAM production to the China-based GSMC under the standard formula “chips for technologies”. (It was also rumored in November that they intended to build a fab in China, but that’s not going to happen). It means there will be a second sturdy alliance a-la Infineon + SMIC (and Infineon is now doing well in China, as I’ve said above). Hynix will get one more advantage from the proposed collaboration in the way of additional elbowroom in its anti-antidumping measures. The measures also include a law suit filed by Hynix against the European Union to eliminate the protective duties of 34.8%, as Hynix claims the money loans it received from the Korean government were absolutely legal. Hynix has something to offer in the technology department, too. They have just started mass production of 256Mbit 0.11-micron DRAM chips in spite of all Micron’s insinuations about Hynix’ being practically unable to master the 0.11-micron process. Well, Micron has reasons to dislike the Koreans.

There’s also another sweet couple, Elpida and Powerchip, who are most ambitious and aspire for an entry in the “top five” list. They are far from it, but do what they can. November Elpida founded a new division to produce memory chips for consumer electronics (a tasty morsel nowadays) and called it “Digital Consumer Division”. And, as I’ve said earlier, the company announced cheap and economical SDRAM chips.