NEC Corp and Toshiba Corp, Japanese chipmakers that are cutting thousands of jobs as losses mount amid declining prices and demand, yesterday said they may accuse South Korean rivals of unfair trade practices.
The companies are considering how to address sales practices that they deem unfair, Toshiba spokesman Shigeyuki Miyazaki and NEC spokesman Makoto Miyakawa said, declining to be more specific about their plans. The spokesmen would not name the foreign rivals in question; Miyakawa said some of the companies unfairly undercutting NEC on prices are South Korean makers.
NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi Ltd and other Japanese electronics makers have announced plans this year to eliminate some 80,000 jobs. The companies also have cut their earnings forecasts, in some cases projecting losses, as prices for computer memory chips fall below production costs.
"We cannot allow some foreign chip companies to continue to do unfair bargain sales, as it will clearly undermine healthy market competition," Miyakawa said. "We're considering every possible action against them."
Samsung Electronics Co and Micron Technology Inc, which between them hold about 40 percent of the market for computer memory chips, have repeatedly said they will not reduce production to try to redress the balance between supply and demand.
Prices of dynamic random access memory chips, the main memory in personal computers, have plummeted to a 10th of what they were a year ago, falling below production costs.
"It's hard to tell whether [not cutting production] is a corporate strategy to expand market share or malpractice," said Satomi Hatsuda, a memory-chip analyst at market researcher Dataquest Inc in the US.
Worldwide sales of computer memory chips are forecast to fall 67 percent this year, to US$10.5 billion, because of falling prices and a demand slowdown exacerbated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the US, Dataquest said.
A Nihon Keizai newspaper report earlier today said NEC, Toshiba and other Japanese chipmakers would accuse South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc and Samsung Electronics Co of dumping chips in the Japan market. The report said the companies would ask Japan's government to impose anti-dumping duties on Korean chips.
Japan's Ministry of Finance hadn't been informed of any intention to file such a complaint, ministry spokesman Jiro Sakai said.
"There is no intention to dump at low prices in Japan or the US," said Kim Seung-soo, a spokesman for Hynix, the third-largest maker of memory chips. "Everyone knows that chip prices are down. It's the market situation."
Hynix derives 18 percent of its sales from Japan.
Samsung, the largest maker of computer memory chips, hasn't received any notice of complaint from Japan, where its sells less than 10 percent of its semiconductors, said company spokesman James Chung.
"We see no need to make an official comment at this point and are hopeful that any problem can be resolved through negotiations," he said.
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