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To: DJBEINO who wrote (6764)	1/7/2000 3:20:00 AM
From: DJBEINO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9582

DRAM contract prices remain high in January Taipei, Jan. 6, 2000 (CENS)--Local manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) said that contract prices for 64Mb DRAM chips in January, traditionally a slack month, will hold steady at the US$7 level achieved in December. The prediction indicates that the peak season will return earlier than expected this year. PowerChip Semiconductor Corp. chairman Frank Huang noted that DRAM prices will soar in second quarter, as many Japanese firms have phased out of the business and a growing number of DRAM chipmakers shift production to more lucrative foundry services. PowerChip, Winbond Electronics, and ProMos Technologies have recently negotiated January contract prices with their customers. Winbond officials say that January prices will be higher than last month's. They note that the exploding demand for Y2K-compliant personal computers has driven up chip sales in January. They estimate that the prices will dip in February and March and recover in April, a month earlier that originally projected. Winbond officials said that local manufacturers are not inclined to dump the chips in February and March since they expect demand to outstrip production beginning in the second quarter. Contract prices for 64Mb DRAM chips, they predict, will maintain at US$7 a chip in the first quarter, due in part to the debut of the memory-hungry Windows 2000 operating system and a backlog of contract orders from December. On January 4, 64Mb DRAM chips were trading on the American IC Exchange for around US$9.07, showing that prices are beginning to stabilize after December's decline. Opinion among local DRAM makers on January contract prices remains mixed. All agree, however, that contract prices will climb and that spot prices will drop soon. In Europe, the gap between contract and spot prices is gradually narrowing, they said.