14 DAY TRIAL // End-users will have likely heard of the ditch the DRAM industry slid into during the later parts of 2010, and which it more or less still is in, but it seems the effects of it were more pronounced than one might expect.
As far as industrial decline goes, two of the more unfortunate developments on the IT segment are the very weak sales of laptops and ever more dismal NAND and DRAM sales, although the latter problem began to recover last month (March).
Still, the decline actually started earlier than that, at least as far as semiconductors go, something that pretty much all involved parties agree on.
DRAM chip prices fell in price very much during the last quarter of 2010 and kept going down until they hit a bottom in February.
Meanwhile, NAND was not as bad off, but some drop in price was still noticed until tablets and other flash storage-using products picked up.
All in all, the last three-month period of 2011 were not good for the semiconductor market as a whole because it was the time of revenue drop.
Specifically, after continued ascent of almost two years, the revenue contract went down by 3.7 percent sequentially.
“The last time a sequential decline happened in the semiconductor industry was during the recent global economic downturn,” said Dale Ford of IHS.
“Following steep declines of 21.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 18.0 percent in the first quarter of 2009, semiconductor revenues began to increase in the second quarter of 2009 and then rose every quarter until the fourth quarter of 2010.”
The analyst firm iSuppli tracked 298 semiconductor suppliers during the period in question and found revenues of $77.2 billion, quite a decline from the $80.1 billion in Q3. Fortunately, this was still a boost over the $69 billion of Q4, 2009.