SB -- from todays WSJ:
... Micron Technology Inc. reported a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss, caused by a price war in memory chips and weakness at its personal-computer affiliate.
Micron reported a loss of $48.1 million, or 23 cents a diluted share, for the fiscal-first period ended Feb. 26, compared with net income of $142.7 million, or 68 cents a diluted share, a year earlier. The loss, Micron's first in seven years, would have been 41 cents a share but for a one-time gain of 18 cents a share on the sale of 90% of the company's stake in its contract-manufacturing business........ In a conference call with analysts, Micron declined to forecast its results for the fiscal third quarter.
"They are holding out hope that fewer factories are coming on line,
easing the over-capacity situation," said Vadim Zlotnikov, analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. "But I'm not expecting supply and demand to come into balance unitl the end of this year."
Micron was hurt by falling memory-chip prices caused in part by an
industry glut in production capacity. Mr. Zlotnikov estimates that prices fell from $4.90 for a 16-megabit chip in the fiscal first quarter to $3.30 in the fiscal second quarter.
Micron had tried to deal with the rapidly falling prices by investing in new chip designs and technology that could allow it to put more chips on a single silicon wafer. That strategy helped cut costs, but not nearly as fast as prices were falling.
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