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

To: StanX Long who wrote (56511)	11/29/2001 12:00:29 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Wednesday November 28 12:49 PM ET Chipmakers' Spat Highlights DRAM Price Uncertainty By James Mackenzie dailynews.yahoo.com FRANKFURT (Reuters) - This week's war of words between two of the world's biggest computer memory chip makers has highlighted the uncertainty behind recent price rises in a market that most observers believe is still deep in crisis. Samsung Electronics, the world's biggest maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, on Tuesday rejected as ''nonsense'' suggestions from Germany's Infineon Technologies AG that it had been deliberately driving down chip prices to squeeze its troubled rival Hynix. Infineon Chief Executive Ulrich Schumacher had told the Financial Times on Monday that the recent rise in DRAM prices was due to artificial pricing by a Korean rival rather than to any improvement in demand, although analysts were skeptical. ``No one will ever know. No one will ever prove anything, but I don't think it was just because of Samsung,'' said Andrew Norwood, senior semiconductor analyst at research firm Gartner Dataquest. Although prices are still only about half of production costs, spot prices for the standard 128 megabit chip have risen as high as $1.75 recently, up from just over one dollar in mid-October. Those gains have come despite the recent bailout of Hynix, which deferred a long-awaited capacity clearout in the market. For Samsung and its rivals such as Infineon and Micron Technology, the world's number two and number four in the memory segment respectively, DRAM prices are crucial drivers of their share prices, which have climbed steadily since October.