Weak DRAM Market Claims a Second Victim

The DRAM market has been struggling to more or less recover over the past six months, but the state of the segment is still bleak, for those in the business of manufacturing and selling memory products at any rate.

We can't say that we didn't expect the poor demand-supply ratio to leave behind another victim among the ranks of DRAM manufacturers.

After all, if a major player like Elpida crumbled and ended up bought by a rival, it was just a matter of time before the oversupply and, consequently, low prices, made it hard for the ones still in the game to stay in the black.

Nanya Technology Corp. is the one contemplating withdrawal from the memory industry, although not in totality.

While the company will cease production of so-called “commodity” dynamic random access memory (DRAM), it will still make LPDDR and LPDDR2, used in consumer electronics.

The transition decision was revealed by the newly appointed president Charles Kao, who expects the change to finalize within a year.

Back in the first quarter (2012), Nanya had 4.5% of the global DRAM market share and produced 55 thousand 300mm wafers a month.

Unfortunately, Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor dominated the standard memory module/kit segment, and continue to do so even now.

Not having a choice but to quit is unfortunate, knowing that Nanya was already moving to the 30nm process and was thinking of 20nm as well.

The partnership with Micron helped, but it was still not enough. The first half of 2012, thus, ended with a loss of $569 million / 442 million Euro.

At this point, Nanya can only go ahead and transfer R&D personnel to Inotera and revise its cooperation with Micron somehow. Depending on how things go on the general-purpose DRAM field, Inotera may or may not stop or delay DDR4 development as well.