14 DAY TRIAL // We already knew that the fire at SK Hynix was having a detrimental effect on the worldwide random access memory industry, but now it seems as though the impact was far greater than anyone expected.
In fact, it's nearly half as bad as when that flood struck Thailand back in late 2011 and incapacitated a great number of HDD and HDD component factories.
This time, there was only one fire at a SK Hynix factory, but it just so happened that said factory was responsible for a great portion of the world's DRAM memory chips.
True, there won't be a huge shortage of dynamic random access memory, at least not to the same extent as on the HDD market in 2012, but it won't be negligible either.
It has already started actually. In just two weeks since the event, the spot prices of DRAM chips went up by 30%.
That goes for both 2 Gb DDR3 chips and for 4 Gb ones. The former now sell at $2.20 / €1.65 instead of the $1.50 / €1.12 prior to the fire, and the latter ships for $4.20 / €3.15.
Curiously, this has happened despite SK Hynix assuring everyone, as reported by Digitimes, that the damage to the Wuxi plant in China was, at best, minimum.
Clearly, it was more a case of sudden but fleeting panic than anything more serious. It's just unfortunate that consumers are, once again, the ones paying the price.
Then again, the plant will only return to full operation at the end of October, and the inventory losses will pile up in the time between September 4 and whenever the fab is reopened.
Thus, the 30% increase in spot prices is only mildly shocking. Just keep in mind that tags aren't likely to go down as fast after things get sorted out.
So if you were thinking of getting memory for Christmas, buying it now might be a good idea, since tags will only go up, and they might not descend beneath the current level before the winter holiday shopping season comes around.