by Anna Filatova
02/15/2006 | 05:11 PM
According to the weekly report from DRAMeXchange, the current situation in the market will hardly push the DDR2 SDRAM prices down in the near future. Unfortunately, it is happening despite the common logics, when the prices tend to drop as the products gets more and more widely spread in the market.
<%BANNER[article]%>DRAMeXchange observes that most first-tier PC OEMs have raised their DDR2 application in PC system in the range of 80% -100% while second-tier makers have also raised the ratio to over 50%. However, some DRAM makers stated that they could only meet 50-60% of OEMs DDR2 demand in February. So, DRAMeXchange believe this is overestimated as PC OEMs tend to report higher demand if they have seen a shortage in order to secure their required volume. The shortage on DDR2 should be around 15% to 20%, DRAMeXchange estimate.
DRAMeXchange predicts DDR2 shortage will still maintain at 10%+ in March despite most DRAM makers will grow their DDR2 output but Samsung continue to allocate more capacity to NAND Flash, mobile RAM and graphics memory, the shortage on DDR2 is expected to persist through 1Q06.
The DDR2 shortage, coupled with the postponed AMD DDR2-supported CPU (from April to June), experts believe DDR will still dominate as the mainstream memory in the spot market in 2Q06. DDR2, on the other hand, should rise as mainstream at the spot market when DRAM makers able to supply sufficient stocks.