14 DAY TRIAL // You'd expect that a company willing and capable of buying a rival with a greater market share than its own would have more promising news to give, but this does not seem to be the case.
Micron bought Rexchip and ELPIDA back in early July 2012, after Elpida ended up in a situation where it had to choose between a very likely demise (it even filed for bankruptcy) and assimilation by another.
The money involved in that transaction was not taken into account when putting together the newest Micron financial report, and yet that still didn't prevent a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars from occurring.
The memory maker has posted a loss of around $243 million for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2012, ended on August 30.
The equivalent of 188 million Euro (give or take a few hundred thousand), it is a larger decline than the one recorded during the same period of the previous year ($135 million / 104 million Euro).
On a sequential basis, the loss was not as severe, as the third fiscal quarter returned a slip of $320 million / 247 million Euro, but it still means a drop in revenue of 9.6% on quarter and 8.3% lower on year.
DRAM revenue fell 9% on quarter, adding to the 12% drop experienced by the NAND Flash business arm (11% decrease in sales volume).
"In 2012, despite difficult market conditions and lower average selling prices, we continued to execute on our technology and manufacturing roadmaps and moved our products increasingly into premium segments. Our focus throughout 2013 is to drive additional cost reductions and advance our leading-edge memory technology to achieve increased manufacturing efficiencies," Micron CEO Mark Durcan said in a statement.
We knew that the DRAM industry was going through some tough times, and this just confirms it. Learning that PCs accounted for less than half of the sales for the first time in history just adds to the peculiarity of it all.