14 DAY TRIAL // In a move that might further cause memory products to get expensive again, Kingston is supposedly leaning towards buying large chip quantities from Elpida and Toshiba.
More precisely, Kingston could end up ordering memory chips, on a large scale, from those companies, so as to enable them to actually get their stockpiles at manageable levels before the year is out.
Some may remember when we wrote about how RAM was the most convenient tech buy of these holidays.
This hasn't changed yet, but memory chips did start going up in cost a short time ago and, if this latest plan comes to fruition, they will keep climbing.
Toshiba and Elpida are two of the more prominent manufacturers of memory chips, so they are bearing the brunt of this low demand.
Thus, Kingston is looking to do them a favor by helping them digest their inventories before the end of 2011.
This could have more than just the immediate effect of lightening the load as well.
Since chips are finally going back up in price, the media will start to suggest that, if there is any moment to run out and buy a module or two, this is the time.
With that to make demand climb again, an upward price trend could be kicked off, since users would keep buying for a while, just to make sure they still got a good deal out of it.
Not that there is anything wrong with this in the grand scheme of things.
While buying 8 GB kits for what 4 GB sold last year is all well and good, it doesn't spell good things for the suppliers of such products and it would definitely not be fortuitous if they suddenly went bankrupt or decided to just back out of it all due to insufficient consumer interest.
That said, so far, the price rebound has been fairly slight, so it is relatively certain that, even after a week or so from now, RAM will still be very cheap compared to last year.