The medium term outlook for the global dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market is bleak with the industry dogged by oversupply, research agency Gartner Inc said yesterday.
Weak DRAM market conditions are expected to continue into next year, with revenue declining 5 percent as prices fall 37.1 percent, said analyst Andrew Norwood in a Gartner Dataquest report.
Gartner expects an increasing amount of capacity to come on line in late next year, as capacity is ramped up and vendors move to 90-nanometer technology from 110-nanometer node.
This will make the second half of the year particularly difficult for DRAM suppliers due to oversupply conditions, it said.
The market would continue to be struck by oversupply with 2007 showing no signs of improvement which could trigger a full-scale price correction with market revenue declining by 20 percent and prices dropping by 50 percent.
It expects global DRAM revenues this year to come in at US$25.7 billion, a 2.3 percent revenue decline year-on-year.
Major DRAM vendors such as Samsung Electronics Co and Hynix Semiconductor Inc have been converting DRAM capacity to NAND flash during the year, preventing a further, severe, oversupply situation in the DRAM market, it said.
South Korea's Samsung Electronics maintained its dominance of the market, but lost market share as the company focused on NAND flash production. Hynix Semiconductor remained in the number two slot with 16.6 percent market share.
"Hynix and Micron have been battling over second place in the DRAM market for two years now," Norwood said. "But Micron is now attacking Hynix on a second front -- NAND flash."
Norwood also said Taiwanese DRAM vendors were big winners in the third quarter of this year, filling the top three global places for fastest growing vendors.
"Nanya Technology Corp (
Norwood said Taiwanese vendors controlled 15.4 percent of the DRAM market in the third quarter of this year, up from 14 percent in the second quarter.
"But this strong performance is still below the previous record of 17 percent," Norwood said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day