DRAM Prices Plunge 18 Percent in Two Weeks

Excerpt:

DRAM contracts for the second half of September, which are negotiated between chip vendors and PC vendors and make up about three-quarters of the DRAM market, fell to just US$1.44 per chip, according to DRAMeXchange [http://www.dramexchange.com], from $1.75 per chip in contracts for the first half of September.

Prices of mainstream chips, 1G-byte DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM chips that run at 667MHz, have been in the doldrums for over a year. ...

Hynix Semiconductor, the second largest DRAM maker in the world, announced last week it will shu two older, 8-inch (200-millimeter) wafer factories. Some industry watchers had hoped the closures might boost DRAM prices, but they won't.

The two Hynix factories were not producing DRAM, according to Andrew Norwood, principal memory analyst at Gartner. They were producing NAND flash memory -- another commodity chip for which pricing has collapsed.