DRAM chipmaker Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said chip prices might stabilize next quarter, as improving inventory along the supply chain and industrywide production cuts have yielded initial results.
“We are feeling a slight [improvement],” company president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) said in response to a reporter’s question about the latest market conditions compared with last month.
“This is not extensive, but a gradual [pickup]. It is moving in a positive direction,” Lee said.
Photo: Lisa Wang, Taipei Times
The mild improvement is driven by a combination of factors including easing inventory pressure and smaller chip supply, Lee said.
TV demand also bounced back lately, he said.
To cope with sagging chip demand, Nanya Technology is adjusting its factory utilization within a range of 20 percent as previously planned, he said.
South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc also unveiled plans to scale down production to prevent a supply glut and falling memorychip prices eating into their profitability.
The DRAM industry has been in a correction cycle for more than a year. Last year, DRAM prices plummeted 40 percent from the previous year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) has said.
With the electronics industry’s peak season arriving in the second half, Nanya Technology expects seasonal demand to help buoy memorychip prices.
PC demand is expected to improve in the third and fourth quarters, compared with the first half of this year, Lee said.
Asked about the effects of China’s restrictions on using Micron Technology Inc memory chips in servers and data centers due to national security concerns, Nanya Technology said it would closely monitor how the restrictions play out.
It is too early to say whether Nanya Technology would benefit from the curbs as some have speculated, as geopolitical issues are complicated, Lee said.
The company has not received any requests from customers to fill the void in supply left by Micron, he said.
Nanya has learned that some companies in China are concerned about being requested to abandon components made by US suppliers, Lee said.
Customers are closely monitoring how geopolitical tensions would affect their component procurement strategy, he said.
China accounts for about 20 percent of Nanya Technology’s revenue, Lee said.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
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