Beware of Memory Prices

For a while now computer memory prices are going up, one little step at a time, after a long period of free falling that created numerous financial problems among most manufacturers. Now, DRAM and NAND prices are expected to rise through the rest of August, even more so after the power outage that hit the Korean production facility of Samsung Electronics last week.

Since the event that caused the power outage, both NAND and DRAM vendors are concerned about the price trend of memories as the demand is increasing steadily, while production, at least for now, lags behind. According to the memory market researcher company DRAMeXchange, cited by the news site DigiTimes, the high memory prices culminated with $9.80, $18.50 and $35.20, for 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb MLC (the shorthand for multi-level cell) NAND flash architecture. As Samsung Electronics is known for its steady NAND and DRAM memory prices, analysts presume that those rises are the effect of the power outage and the company tries to cover its losses.

The upward trend of the price of DRAM memory is expected to jump another 5 percent in the second half of the month according to DRAMeXchange that also noted that pricing for a 512MB of DDR2 grew by 6 percent already. As the next intense shopping season is expected to see more computer systems having about 2GB of memory, the demand will certainly increase and make a further price increase very likely.

Other computer memory manufacturers and vendors are very likely to copy Samsung Electronics' example and post a price increase. For example, Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC for short) already raised its 512MB DDR2 eTT (the shorthand for effectively tested) price by about 10 percent in several small increments. Financial analysts think that the PSC company raised the quotes for the 512MB DDR2 memory modules in an attempt to drive the customers and retail channel dealers toward the use of greater capacity memories.