To all watching memory prices:
From Computer resellers news:
Last Updated 8:45 a.m.
MEMORY PRICES DROPPING FAST <<<< Misprint , read the story !!!
By John Longwell
Irvine, Calif.
Memory prices jumped precipitously on the spot market and were continuing to rise today,
marking an abrupt reversal to the sharply declining prices over the last three months.
"It's across the board, perhaps 20 percent. It will probably be 30 percent by the end of the day,"
said Rob Reed, executive vice president of Advantage Memory Corp., Irvine, Calif. "It's been
quite a roller coaster."
Reed said Advantage is now paying as much as $17 for a megabyte of memory compared with a
little as $10 per megabyte a few days ago at the market's bottom.
DRAM chips in 1-Mbyte by 32-bit capacity were being quoted by spot market brokers as high as
$70 on Thursday, sources said. The chips had been trading for $44 in recent days.
Industry sources were uncertain for the reasons for the unusual activity, but said rising tensions
between China and Taiwan combined with speculative buying may have precipitated the surge.
Some suppliers could be stocking up on memory, betting prices had hit bottom and would rise.
Kingston Technology Corp., Fountain Valley, Calif., the largest supplier of SIMM modules,
dropped prices on its memory modules by 30 percent last week and said it had no plans to raise
prices, despite spot-market price fluctuations.
Industry observers have blamed much of the recent glut of DRAM on the market to dumping by
computer manufacturers and Intel Corp., which overstocked last year because of supply worries
and optimistic sales projections.
Some analysts have been predicting prices would stabilize after manufacturers worked through their
inventories and corporate demand for computers picked up.
Gary MacDonald, vice president of marketing for Kingston, said he expected prices to stabilize by
the second half of this year but did not expect them to bounce back to previous levels.
"By the end of the year, it's possible prices could climb," he said.
"I could imagine a set of scenarios that cumulatively could put us back on allocation, but for it to go
bouncing back like a ball would take something dramatic." |
