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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lone Star who wrote (33828)	1/17/2000 5:50:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

INTERVIEW-DRAM prices seen up in H2-Hyundai exec By Yoo Choon-sik SEOUL, Jan 17 (Reuters) - International prices for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductors are expected to remain stable early this year and rise in the second half, a Hyundai Electronics Industries Co executive said on Monday. ''I think the price will be stable in the first three months, maybe a little bit downward pressured because of seasonality, but towards the second quarter and second half of this year, prices will be going up,'' Hyundai Vice President Farhad Tabrizi told Reuters in a telephone interview. He said the strong price trend expected for the second half of the year would be driven by a shortage in supply as a result of sluggish investment by makers in recent years. ''In demand, we are considering about 70-80 percent bit growth, and on the supply side, we see about 70 percent of growth if nothing goes wrong in terms of yields and production and manufacturing,'' said Tabrizi, in charge of strategic marketing. ''We had four years of oversupply and 1999 was basically balanced. And 2000, 2001 and 2002, there's going to be a shortage,'' he said. ''The longer the oversupply, the longer the shortage, because when the oversupply exists, people stop investing.'' Mainstay 64-megabit DRAM chips now trade at around $8-9 per unit in international spot markets, compared with a 1999 peak of over $20 in October, company officials say. The 128-megabit DRAMs, now trading at about $20 per unit, are expected to emerge as the mainstay in the world market this year as personal computers require more memory capacity to process multimedia data. Tabrizi said major DRAM companies would remain reluctant to build new production lines despite the strong price because the industry is set to migrate to a 12-inch wafer fabrication technology from the current eight-inch format. ''The next fabs DRAM companies are thinking about are 12-inch fabs and 12-inch fabs are really at this time not ready for production. So I'm not seeing a lot of new capacity being added for DRAMs,'' he said. He said Hyundai, the world's largest DRAM maker in terms of production capacity, is expected to introduce the 12-inch fabrication technology in the second half of 2002. Hyundai said the company might select South Korea or another place for the next-generation plants, instead of resuming construction on two factories in Britain suspended for several years in their early stages. ''The site vacancy (in Britain), compared to the investment need, is a minor factor. A 12-inch fab will cost about $2.5 billion,'' he said. ''The main factor is where the expertise is and how best we can quickly move into production.'' He reiterated the company's earlier projection for its 1999 after-tax net profit of between 200 billion and 300 billion won, compared with a net loss of 145 billion won a year earlier. Hyundai took over local chipmaker LG Semicon Co and absorbed the company in late 1999. biz.yahoo.com