DRAM prices wilt to record lows
By Jack Robertson
EBN
(06/01/01 14:20 p.m. EST)
Electronics systems makers may be smarting from excess inventories and weak end demand, but they can be assured of a good deal on DRAM as the price of commodity memory chips plunged this week to record lows.
A survey of DRAM sourcing sites found that mainstream 128Mbit chips dropped to less than $3 each on certain Asian spot markets, about the same level at which 64Mbit devices were trading only five months ago. That precipitous decline prompted some chip makers to proclaim this the worst-ever pricing crash the memory market has witnessed.
“It's never been this bad,” said Jim Sogas, vice president of sales and marketing at Elpida Memory Co. Inc., San Jose, summing up the vendor viewpoint.
At the opposite pole, customers can look to the DRAM sector to deliver bargain-basement deals, which show no signs of abating any time soon. DRAM prices will stabilize only when demand picks up in the PC space and in networking and other communications end-equipment markets, “and right now that is anyone's guess,” said Sherry Garber, an analyst at Semico Research Corp., Phoenix.
Sogas called SDRAM demand forecasts “elusive.”
Indeed, though they are already at historic lows, SDRAM prices will continue to fall, according to Grant Johnson of Converge Inc., a Peabody, Mass., online trading exchange. “The PC and telecom markets are depressed and they aren't buying the quantities of chips that fabs can turn out,” Johnson said. “Yet chip companies are forced to continue producing at high levels to pay for the depreciation and investment costs of the fabs.
“I talk to our product managers on the trading floor, and they tell me this is the lowest-priced market they've ever seen. And they are expecting it to get worse,” Johnson said.
On the spot market, 128Mbit SDRAM was selling for $3 to $3.25, with some Asian commodity quotes below that level, according to Johnson. Sogas suspects that the lowest prices could represent one-time panic sales of off-brand parts, but agreed that prices for SDRAM will continue to plumb new depths.
Even OEM contract prices are in the $3 to $3.50 range for 128Mbit devices, Sogas added.
Analysts and chip makers alike blamed cascading memory chip prices on producers and customers unloading excess inventories into the spot market. Merrill Lynch Securities last week reported that suppliers' SDRAM inventories grew to five to six weeks, larger than most vendors want.
The rock-bottom prices could give a send-off to Intel Corp.'s upcoming launch of its SDRAM-enabled Brookdale chipset by giving its Pentium 4 processor a low-cost memory alternative to Direct Rambus DRAM. More than 100 Taiwan-made Pentium 4 motherboards are expected to be shown this week at the Computex show in Taipei using the Brookdale chipset with SDRAM.
Plunging prices also could help Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which uses third-party chipsets and its own AMD 760 chipset to connect SDRAM to its Athlon and Duron processors. |
