Stock prices of the nation's major computer memory chipmakers outperformed the main bourse yesterday amid speculation on further price rebounds.
This came after disruption at a Chinese plant belonging to the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker Hynix Semiconductor Inc, which could lead to an ease in a supply glut.
Shares of the nation’s biggest dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chipmaker, Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), jumped 0.78 percent to NT$13 yesterday, better than the turbulent TAIEX index, which fell 2.43 percent.
South Korean Hynix yesterday said the 15-hour outage at a Chinese plant operated jointly with Numonyx, a joint venture with STmicroelectronics, Intel and Francisco Partners, would not have a major adverse effect as emergency power generation activated immediately.
The affected plant, located in Wuxi, southern China, makes 100,000 12-inch wafers of DRAM chips a month, accounting for about half of the Korean firm’s total DRAM chip output. Hynix also operates an 8-inch plant in Wuxi, making memory chips used in consumer electronics.
“Hynix’s power outage may affect one week’s worth of production,” Taipei-based market researcher DRAMeXchange Technology Inc (集邦科技) said in a statement yesterday.
DRAMeXchange said the output disruption greatly boosted the spot price of benchmark DDR2 1Gb 128Mx8, which jumped 1.21 percent to US$2 per unit yesterday following an almost five percent decline during the slow season last week.
Hynix said the outage on Monday was likely to result in a US$16million to US$18 million loss in sales. It would take about two days for the plant to resume normal operations, the chipmaker said.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc estimated that supply could be cut by 3 percent to 4 percent in the next one to two months.
Stock prices of the nation’s third-largest DRAM chip supplier ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) climbed 0.37 percent, while Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) was down 0.77 percent.
Separately, DRAMeXchange expected the contract price of DRAM chips to recover by an additional five percent to 10 percent in the second half of this month, helped by slower output expansion and early demand for back-to-school shopping season.
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