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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (50655)	3/7/2000 1:21:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

Hi Robert. You can check spot prices at www.pricewatch.com. This site lists companies that sell directly to the public and resellers but the prices are highly competitive: they change quickly to reflect trends. I watch the prices on a few commodity parts: after a 2-3 week trend is established the analysts usually follow with reports that the contract prices have come down or gone up correspondingly. The trend over the past three plus months has been to the downside: PC100s have dropped back to the level they were at last summer. At that time they were selling at a level that chip companies were losing money. Since then the break-even point has been lowered through mfg. efficiencies and process shrinks. The marginal players lose money at today's prices and the state of the art competitors squeeze out a modest margin IMO. One of Microns strong points over the past few quarters has been sales of PC133s. That brought about twice the price of PC100s last year. The differential between PC133s and PC100s has shrunk to less than 30%. It almost got to parity a few weeks ago, then rebounded and recently has begun trending back down but is still higher than it was. RDRAMs are supposed to be the ticket that provides higher margins to the DRAM mfgs ? I don?t see how that will offset the lower prices for commodity DRAMs. PC133s and Double data-rate parts that operate at 266 MHz should supply the majority of market needs at substantially lower cost than RDRAM. RDRAM was supposed to happen 18 months ago. I don't believe it will meet the market hype until it is bludgeoned down in price much closer to parity with DDRAM.