Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said revenue inched up 1.62 percent last month, supported by higher shipments and a weak New Taiwan dollar, but the nation’s top DRAM chipmaker expects last quarter’s price decline to extend into the current quarter due to dwindling seasonal demand for PCs.
Revenue rose to NT$4.16 billion (US$130 million) last month from NT$4.09 billion in November last year. Shipments climbed 2.2 percent last month from the prior month, while the average selling price fell 2.5 percent during the same period, the company said.
Nanya Technology said the weak NT dollar versus the US dollar helped boost last month’s revenue by 1.9 percent. The NT dollar plummeted by 2.19 percent against the US dollar last month to NT$31.718 from a month earlier.
Last month’s figure helped boost last quarter’s unaudited revenue by 3.49 percent from NT$13.09 billion in the third quarter.
“Last quarter’s [revenue] figure mostly matched our previous forecast,” vice president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) said by telephone.
Lee expected shipments to be flat in the quarter ending on Dec. 31 last year, with the average selling price to dip by between 3 percent and 5 percent sequentially.
As the PC industry enters a slack season, Lee expects the price decline to deepen.
“DRAM chips used in PCs will be affected the most in the first quarter because of seasonal factors, followed by low-power DRAM chips [used mostly in mobile devices],” Lee said.
He also expects prices for memory chips used in consumer electronics, such as TV set-top boxes, to fall further for another two months.
DRAM chips used in PCs account for about 30 percent of Nanya Technology’s revenue.
Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技), a joint venture between Nanya Technology and US memory chip giant Micron Technology Inc, yesterday posted a 0.6 percent increase in revenue for last month to NT$7.04 billion from November’s NT$7 billion.
Revenue grew 2.42 percent sequentially for last quarter to about NT$20.76 from NT$20.27 billion.
This year, global DRAM chip revenue is expected to grow 16 percent annually to US$54.1 billion, as limited-capacity supply is expected to prop up prices, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said in a report released last month.
That will also help boost the gross margin of PC DRAM chips, and this year should be another lucrative year for chipmakers, the Taipei-based researcher said.
Last year, the gross margin of PC DRAM chips improved to 40 percent, it said.
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