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DRAM quarterly revenue best since 2000 |
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Aug 08, 2006 at 03:07 PM |
 By Dr Mike Cooke
Market researcher Gartner Dataquest reports the highest quarterly revenue for the DRAM market since third quarter 2000. The second quarter sales reached $7.4 billion. The third quarter 2000 is still a way off at $9.3 billion. Comparison with second quarter 2005 is $5.9 billion, giving a year-on-year increase of 26.9%. First half revenues were up 11.5% year-on-year at $13.9 billion.
The market researcher believes that the improvement has come from a better supply-and-demand outlook. Higher prices have been possible based on reduced supplies of DDR1, although DDR2 suffered from lack of demand at the beginning of the quarter pushing revenues down in that sector. Demand has now shifted to DDR2, strengthening prices for the part by the end of the quarter.
Overall bit shipment increases were in the low double digit percentages. Average selling prices (ASPs) increased 0.8% over the first quarter.
The DRAM top eight producers remained unchanged from the first quarter.
Note: Licensing, embedded memory and flash
memory revenue have been excluded from Qimonda's revenue. Similar adjustments
have been made for other vendors.
Source: Gartner Dataquest (August 2006)
In the spot market, overall average pricing across all densities and technologies was up last week (ended 4 August 2006) 1.9% compared with the previous week, standing at $2.52 on a 256Mb equivalent basis - this despite some profit-taking activities toward the end of last week. The spot pricing changes have ranged from stable to an increase of 4.2%. The market sentiment for a positive DDR1 pricing outlook remains, causing transaction volumes to remain fairly flat. DDR2 devices showed a pricing recovery last week, after month-end pressures for inventory clearance the previous week.
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