The bad news for memory makers: prices for DRAM (dynamic random access memory) were in a free-fall in Q2 as gut-wrenching as the one flash companies like Sandisk (SNDK) and Intel (INTC) reported in earnings the past two weeks. (Flash prices, however, are clearly rising.)
The good news for PC buyers: Because of the DRAM collapse, those laptops and desktops you’ll be ogling later this year, which will run new memory-hungry operating systems from Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT), should be a little cheaper thanks to lower component costs.
In the charts below the links, research firm iSuppli documents just how bad the memory supply glut has gotten. (The data was released Friday.) The top five memory producers – including Quimonda (QI) and Micron Technology (MU) – have all announced that they’re going to make less memory than they plan to ship in the third quarter – that should firm up prices a bit. Putting the prices in perspective, iSuppli says:
- Global DRAM revenue declined by 24.1 percent, falling to $7.3 billion, down from $9.7 billion in the first quarter.
- Samsung Electronics and Micron, which suffered 16.7 percent and 15.7 percent respective declines in revenue during the quarter, actually significantly outperformed the market and gained share.
- The DRAM per-megabit Average Selling Price (ASP) plunge of 39 percent was actually marginally good news, because it was slightly less than the 40 percent drop iSuppli Corp. had predicted.
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