by Ilya Gavrichenkov
03/05/2002 | 10:23 AM
According to Korea Times, two largest Korean manufacturers, Samsung and Hynix, started negotiating another memory chip price-rise with their main partners. If they come to an agreement, the prices will be increased for the 7th time over the last three months. This time they’ll hit the bar of $5 for 128Mbit PC133 SDRAM chip (as DRAMeXchange writes, the current price level is $4-4.5).
The news is not pleasant, but we guess that all these repeated price-rises are nothing more than a market test (or just a vulgar bluff, if you like). As soon as the demand for memory falls lower than needed, the prices will inevitably creep back (we already commented on this matter in a corresponding article). In other words, the memory makers try to experimentally define the real price lost during the fierce last-year battle for survival.