by Anna Filatova
05/13/2002 | 07:14 PM
The memory prices keep dropping. And the more they drop, the more discontent is expressed by the memory makers. Only a few days ago (see this news story) the minimal price of a 128Mbit chips got as low as $2.5 per piece, and today the same PC133 SDRAM chips are selling for $1.85. DDR266 chips cost a bit more ($2.1), but also keep dropping.
Of course, the largest memory manufacturers can’t remain indifferent to this situation, so they do their best to stop this price drop at any rate. They haven’t yet come up with any global solutions to the matter (the problems they face have been already discussed here), however, there are some temporary means, which might be of help here: they have to agree with one another and refrain from throwing new chip supplies into the oversaturated market. Of course, this may not last long, as they will have to resume selling chips sooner or later, but creating this artificial shortages (or artificial equality of the demand and supply) might help get some extra profits.<%BANNER[article]%>
In fact, the three largest memory manufacturers – Samsung, Micron and Hynix – are going to act this way. The latter ha already pushed the negotiations of the kind to get started. So far we have not idea if they manage to make any decision like that or not, but it will anyway be a hard decision to make as they have already got a really solid amount of chips in stock. Samsung has enough to last 1 month, Micron – 1.5 months and Hynix – 2 months.