14 DAY TRIAL // Capitalism is truly showing its teeth, now that a factory from China, belonging to SK Hynix, caught a fire severe enough to affect production of DRAM chips set to be used in PCs globally. Samsung will benefit from the incident.
Obviously, Samsung didn't go around lighting fires, and most other people don't do such things either. Regardless of what some feel, pyromaniacs are rather rare.
Still, the fact remains that a SK Hynix memory chip factory from China suffered a fire recently, causing a hit to the global supply of PC-use DRAM.
Thus, rival companies are likely to have to fill in for the orders SK Hynix will have to pass up on.
And since Samsung is one of the prime developers and manufacturers of semiconductors in the world, it stands to gain the most.
In fact, enough parties already believe that Samsung has received, or expects to receive, demand high enough to warrant an output increase at its own factories.
This is a sharp contrast to the way Samsung has been shifting its DRAM business focus to mobile device chips since late 2012.
Clearly, Samsung saw the signs of the flagging PC market for what they were and took steps to safeguard its business in advance.
After all, when you live in a capitalistic world, half of your success depends on your ability to foresee the marketing conditions of later months and years.
In this case, the impact of the fire was not among the things that could be predicted, just like no one thought a huge flood would strike Thailand in late 2011 and essentially cut in half the world's supply of HDDs.
Anyway, Samsung will increase its DRAM output according to reports from industry sources, unless it decides to do something just as unexpected as the fire and not react to SK Hynix' woe at all.
Given the sequential drop of 5% in global DRAM market share in 2Q 2013, however, that is not at all probable.