Skip to main content

Flash memory prices pressure chip manufacturers

In an article presented today at DigiTimes, there was more bad news for manufacturers of NAND flash memory. And perhaps another negative for Apple (AAPL) was revealed.

The reporters announced that Apple has not yet started making big procurements of NAND flash memory thus far in 2008. With NAND already selling below cost, according to sources at Taiwan memory makers, this lack of demand from a major customer could make a bad situation worse for NAND manufacturers. We have already had an announcement from Intel (INTC) that their margins are being hurt by the persistent pricing problems in NAND flash. It can only be a matter of time before we hear the same tune from SanDisk (SNDK), Micron (MU), Samsung and others.

As for Apple, a number of their new product announcements have involved flash, such as the solid state drive in the MacBook Air. Many existing products are heavily dependent on flash including the iPod and iPhone. Having purchased approximately $1.2 billion worth of flash in 2007, the perceived lack of orders is unnerving to flash vendors. Is bellwether Apple seeing weaker demand?

As for the flash manufacturers, consider this quote from the DigiTimes article: "As memory makers can now hardly tune their capacity mixture with DRAM when the DRAM industry is also experiencing a trough, the downward NAND flash price trend seems to have no catalyst to make prices trend upward in the near term..."

Looks like it could be a tough few quarters for the memory makers and those companies that sell semiconductor manufacturing equipment to them. And maybe Apple, too.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation

Trade Radar gets another update

Some of our data sources changed again and it impacted our ability to load fundamental/financial data. In response, we are rolling out a new version of the software: 7.1.24 The data sourcing issues are fixed and some dead links in the Chart menu were removed. So whether you are a registered user or someone engaged in the free trial, head over to our update page and download the latest version. The update page is here:   https://tradingstockalerts.com/software/downloadpatch Contact us if you have questions or identify any new issues.

Interactive Ads - Google one-ups Yahoo again

Google's ( GOOG ) press release describing the expansion of a beta program for what are being called Gadget Ads has again shown that Google is unparalleled at melding technology and advertising to benefit its bottom line. Gadget Ads are mini-web pages or "widgets" that can be embedded within publisher pages. I have written in the past on Yahoo's ( YHOO ) Smart Ads and how, by more precisely targeting site users and adjusting ad content accordingly, they provide a much desired evolution of the banner or display ad format. Though Smart Ads and Gadget Ads are not really the same, I think it is fair to say that Google has seen the challenge of Smart Ads and has chosen to leapfrog Yahoo by rolling out its own update to the display ad format. The evolution of the Gadget Ad -- One of the trends on the Internet over the last year or so involves software developers creating "widgets" which can be hosted within web pages and blogs. Widgets can be pretty much anything