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The Courts Government Hardware News

DRAM Price Fixing 148

Posted by Hemos from the how-we-all-agree-on-the-price dept.
AEton writes "There's an interesting article up at Newsforge, an OSDN sibling site, about price fixing in the DRAM market. According to Melanie Hollands, a technology analyst, market consolidation and uncertain prices have contributed to subtle cooperation between the major DRAM "competitors" to keep prices high. While she finds little "hard evidence of collusion", there are strong circumstantial trends which last year sparked a secretive Department of Justice antitrust inquiry." Allegations of this have been floating around for a while - heck, you can even join the suit.
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DRAM Price Fixing More

DRAM Price Fixing

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  • You will eat your RAM and like it! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) * on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:07AM (#5935518) Journal


    Big deal, happens to everything. Sooner or later one of them breaks down with money issues and that bottom falls out or some upstart comes along and cleans house. With memory prices as low as they are right now this is like getting bent about a "price fixing" problem with paper clips. How about they figure out how to get gas down from 2.50 a pop...
    • guess it depends on how much ram you want. if you want it for main memory in your computer, then yeah, it's cheap in the same way that it doesn't cost you much to fill your lawn mower with gas. however, if you're waiting for prices to come down so that something like, say a solid state HDD to become a serious contender in the market (as in priced as such), then this makes all the difference.

      • Good point, and it has merit. Although if you have been watching the memory market as of late there have been huge jumps in tech around this area. Crazy jumps really. So, it seems that dram will have a short live future anyway. Just like everything else if you price yourself out of the market someone eats your lunch.

        Although I understand where you are coming from and agree with you, I don't think you will have to wait much longer.

    • Exactly... The market always tends towards monopoly. Either through collusion, (why should companies try to outdo each other when they can help maintain a comfortable status quo?) or competition eliminating the weaker of the competitors through natural market conditions. Of course, that doesn't mean the natural market condition is what is actually wanted, it's a fallacy of capitalism. People won't just 'play fair'. Oh yes, here's some insight [hondacars.com] about your gas price problem.
    • The Korean government and, in general, Korean society is the culprit behind the price fixing. The Korean government has long subsidized the electronics businesses of Samsung, Hyundai, and LG Semicon. Using these subsidies, the Korean companies sold their DRAM memory chips at a loss and drove non-Korean businesses out of the market. The Koreans own 50% of the market for DRAM chips. Once the competitors are gone, the Koreans start raising prices on the memory chips. Please read " Koreans Hit U.S. Hynix Dec [eweek.com]


    • The problem is that DRAM manufacturers did collaborate from time to time to either hike up the price or pull the price to artificially low level.

      I still remember the time when Hynix (of Korea) was in big trouble - not that it isn't in deep doo-doo right now - Samsung collaborated with Microns to pull the DRAM price to some ridiculously low level and they did so for one simple reason - they wanted Hynix to be D-E-A-D so they can get rid of one of their most competitive competitors.

  • Boycott memory chip makers ! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:08AM (#5935520)
    Aww, so Infineon, Micron, Samsung and all the others fix DRAM prices eh ? well SCREW them bastards. Let's all boycott RAM, let's all run our entire systems in SWAP !! That'll teach them !

  • One word: Sumitomo (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:10AM (#5935526)
    Way back... a plastics manufacturer had the only plant currently set up to produce the epoxy resin used in most plast ICs.

    RAM prices tripled overnight.

    No other chips raised in price, and the epoxy, still priced around US$5-US$6 a pound, had a 6 month stockpile sitting at the site. All of the RAM manufacturers also had 6 month stockpiles of the stuff.

    Plants in the US and Japan could have bene brought online in months, and Sumitomo had their plant back online within 6 months.

    RAM sellers suck. I don't know where the exact problem is, but it's treated as a commodity, and it's wrong.

    • Re:One word: Sumitomo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:19AM (#5935563) Homepage Journal
      IIRC there was a fire at the Sumitomo plant. Just like the stock market (anyone remember the late 90s? I thought so), there's a lot of speculation that goes on in this market. When people heard of the fire, they started hoarding chips, anticipating a shortfall later; this lead to some appearance of shortage and hence higher prices; which led to more hoarding; which led to more shortage; and so on.

      • Re:One word: Sumitomo (Score:4, Informative)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @10:56AM (#5936920) Homepage Journal
        I asked my usual RAM dealer about this. They told me that in fact only about 10% of the factory's capacity was shut down, and the incident was indeed being exaggerated by everyone for the sole purpose of raising RAM prices.

        The joke was on them, tho, because after the spike, prices fell to an all-time low ($57/gig for DIMMs).

        I suspect present prices have more to do with having found a marketing sweet spot than anything else. They've learned that consumers will readily pay about $20 per 128mb, so that's where the pricing has stuck for some time now, regardless of costs.

    • what sucks is globalization (Score:4, Insightful)

      by muyuubyou ( 621373 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:37AM (#5935627)
      When a very limited number of companies control the whole world's market, things like this happen.

      The user is helpless when they have so much control. Reached this point, competition is not enough and the market doesn't regulate itself at all. This is when free market means free for big corporations to abuse and screw the rest.

    • Re:One word: Sumitomo (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cornice ( 9801 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:47AM (#5935670)
      RAM sellers suck. I don't know where the exact problem is, but it's treated as a commodity, and it's wrong.

      In business, "Commodity" typically means an item that is not differentiated from others and sold purely for what it is, without regard for who made it. Price is the only thing that matters when buying a commodity and only the producers that can sell for the lowest price survive. It's typically considered a bad thing when you let your product become so plain that it's considered a commodity. Did you meant to say commodity because that would typically be a good thing for consumers?
    • One of the many rumors... there were a few earthquakes, and other disasters that caused prices to jump. At one point there were a few people hitting the usenet groups about how prices were going through the roof. It was kind of funny that they all were posted from the same company that made dram.
    • Yeah yeah... I screwed up the post. I meant to mention the explosion. Fingers went faster than my brain.

      I had published a long rant about this when it happened.
    • That happened in 1993.

  • Dumb price fixing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:11AM (#5935534)
    Considering the DRAM manufacturers are typically losing money on every chip they sell, this would have to be pretty bad collusion between the major players.

    Whichever companies outlast the others and able to secure enough financing to pay for the next major technology node will be able to set whatever price they want - the profit margin is already so low (negative!) that no one will want to become a competitor.

    IBM was pretty smart to get out of that business years ago.

    • Re:Dumb price fixing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Considering the DRAM manufacturers are typically losing money on every chip they sell ...

      Do you have any factual information at all that would support such a statement?

      I don't believe it.

  • you can even join the suit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:15AM (#5935548)
    "While she finds little "hard evidence of collusion", there are strong circumstantial trends which last year sparked a secretive Department of Justice antitrust inquiry." Allegations of this have been floating around for a while - heck, you can even join the suit."

    Hey, who needs evidence!! "It was HIM" That's all the evidence I need!

    So lynch mobs are ok if they go for large companies? How peculiar!

    Get some proof, or fuck off.

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by borgdows ( 599861 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:18AM (#5935562)
    According to /me, a technology analyst, market consolidation and Windows upgrade cycles have contributed to subtle cooperation between the major DRAM "competitors" and Microsoft to keep demand high.
  • wasnt an expensive and excessive ram stick the entire of point of dram?

    The only time I've ever seen a heat sink on ram was when I cracked open ibm incrapastaion and found the dram

    Someone please explain to me how its neccary to have ram going that fast? That suff has got a full queue at all times because the proccsor cant keep up!
    • Uhhhh I think you need to double-check your terms. DRAM is a larger, cheaper, but slower, alternative to SRAM. It's basically a FET and a capacitor as opposed to SRAM which takes a couple FETs. There are many variants of DRAM, such as SDRAM, RDRAM, etc used in PCs which as far as I know, mainly affect how they're clocked (I've only ever interfaced to vanilla DRAM myself).

      Anyway, you're probably thinking of RDRAM (RIMMs). That said, faster memory == good, so long as the bus can keep up.
  • The small number of memory makers forming a cartel, I guess, is a signal we might need an open design for RAM. After the Intel-Via settlement, looks like we might even need a free-design CPU as well. Hard disks, FDDs, CDROMs and CD writers are okay I guess. RAM and CPUs need to be fixed urgently.
    • One problem here. Slouch-backed youths hunkering over their keyboard on the Internet can copy content back and forth that they've 'ripped' off of CDs and DVDs. They can't 'rip' the essense out of DRAM and CPU chips and copy the design patterns around to easily replicate. The replication process is, ummm, a bit more complex than putting cheap CDR disks into a slot.

      Sorry. Different thing entirely.

  • Price fixing? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dunark ( 621237 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:25AM (#5935586)
    If there's been price-fixing, it certainly hasn't been very competently done. DRAM prices have been in the flusher for quite a while now, and the manufacturers are losing money at an amazing rate.
    • I can't believe they class these prices as high! Prices haven fallen so much over the years. Maybe this is something only affecting the US? (I'm in the UK).

    • Re:Price fixing? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @09:40AM (#5936333)
      Indeed; let's make a comparison with of storage technology pricing. I can buy a 512MB RAM module for around $50. This solid state storage supports random access to any location within nanoseconds, hundreds of megabytes per second bandwidth, and can be rewritten an unlimited number of times.

      I can buy a 700MB Top-40 CD for $16.99. While the cost per byte is only 25% of that for DRAM, the CD has many offsetting disadvantages. It is an optical disk that requires a dedicated hardware drive to access. Random access time is many milliseconds (10 or more seconds for the first access), and only supports a couple of megabytes per second bandwidth. It can't be written to at all. But the worst part is that this storage is indelibly encoded with an hour of unlistenable audio crap.

      In short, compared to the DRAM, the CD is utterly useless. Yet somehow it commands a price per byte almost 1/4 of the DRAM. It's also intersting to note that about a dozen years ago, the DRAM would have cost about $500000 (a 10000:1 price drop), but the CD was still about $16.99. Somehow, the CD is immune to cost reduction. This is real price fixing.

      • Somehow, the CD is immune to cost reduction. This is real price fixing.

        Should a painter's work be priced lower because she moved into a cheaper apartment?

        Yes, CDs are expensive. Yes, there might be price fixing. No, there's no proof. No, as with any other work of art, you are not really paying for the medium.

  • Howto - Legalized Price Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by snatchitup ( 466222 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:26AM (#5935595) Homepage Journal
    It's actually a stupid law. Anti-price fixing that is.

    In fact, the most important commodity in America is readily purchased from a price-fixing cartel (aka OPEC).

    Here's the howto on legalized price-fixing in America.

    Monday... from the Wall Street Journal, "AT&T announces a 4.3% price increase in consumer long distance rates across the board."

    Tuesday... from the NY Times, "MCI announces a 4.35% price increase in consumer long distance rates..."

    (Result: A successful price fixing.)

    Or it could go like this....
    Monday... WSJ Reports "AT&T announces a 6% increase in consumer l.d. rates.

    Tuesday... WSJ Report "MCI announces a 3% rate hike."

    Wednesday... "WSJ Reports "AT&T announces a 50% decrease in a previously announces rate hike due to customer complaints..."

    (Result: A successful price fixing in two stages.)

    Shit happens man.

    • Re:Howto - Legalized Price Fixing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Cyno ( 85911 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @12:06PM (#5937433) Journal
      Or look at the RIAA and MPAA.

      Many media companies have formed into these happy associations that just happen to set the price of CDs or DVDs around $15.

      We all know the costs in making and distributing a 5" plastic disc are less than $1 and songs that have been off the charts for a couple years won't produce a profit. But that doesn't stop them from "price fixing".

      The problem is not the artists, the developers, the manufacturers. The problem is that capitalism is a broken system. Its a system designed to allow people to screw eachother over. Shit happens all the time, everywhere. The whole point of capitalism is to make as much money as you can, which means by the end of your life you might end up with a lot of money but everyone else would have had to slave away their whole lives while you screwed them over to provide you with your valuable possessions.

      These things. These items we place so much economic value in. Are they really that important to our lives? So important that we would sell our kids into a lifetime of slavery just to prove our point that Capitalists are wealthy or that money doesn't grow on trees?

      But money does grow on trees, like every other paper product we produce.
      • Why turn a great example into flamebait?

        You're arguing for an even worse system, Marxism, to solve the problem of price fixing by letting the govt. make the market.
        • I'm arguing for a system that has never been tried before, anywhere.

          When did the communists have an internet or enough free software to implement a completely open government where all people within a nation could participate? When did any communist nation ever have leadership focused on taking care of their people's needs, wants, desires, etc? When has there ever been a humanitarian country? Not a country that cares about economics and money and ending poverty, but a country that cares about its people
          • We act like the government and the people are two different things. In a democracy. In a fair democracy, they do not have to be.

            My idea of a fair democracy is one which any citizen has complete access to all information and their voice is heard by all relevent parties, etc. A fair democracy would have the government writing software that provides people in an automated fassion with all the information they would like to recieve. Nothing would be hidden out of malice or someone's selfish personal agenda
      • except that US money is made of cotton!
      • The problem is that capitalism is a broken system.

        Capitalism is a system designed to best allocate scarce (finite) resources amongst a group of cooperative participants (a market). To that end it has been wildly successful, resulting in creating a massive superpower out of the one country to embrace it as a fundamental, national principle. On the other hand, capitalism works only when allocating scarce resources. The immediate corollary is that you can't apply capitalism to ideas, which aren't finite and

  • Maybe another reason (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Technician ( 215283 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:37AM (#5935633)
    I know it looks funny, but think about the market dynamics. Most chip manufactures can change photomasks and either make DRAM, Flash RAM, Cell Phone chips, Network Chips, etc. The market has some fluctiuations. When the price is up, management shifts to produce what is profitable. When the market is down, they sell off inventory and tool for other chips. I know Intel closed a flash plant when flash prices fell. They started again when Cell Phones needed lots more memory driving the price back up. The market swings. The manufactures can't instantly deliver. It takes time to react to the market. Starting a new product line takes several months from new raw wafers to finished deliverable components. It's easy to flood the market if you don't know your compeditors are also trying to fill 100% of a shortage. A shortage of 500,000 units could quickly become a glut of 1,500,000 units as 3 manufactures come on line to supply the shortage. They all get stung with the rapid price drop while trying to recover the manufacturing costs. The margins are quite thin most of the time in the DRAM market. Bumps in demand do catch the suppliers off guard.
    • Well, that aint that easy.
      You cant just "switch" from RAM to Flash or ASICS.
      YOu need at least 45+ days until production is running even with compatible processes.

      Main reason for the huge fluctuations is the fact that fabs are that expensive. Every company has to continue production even with very low prices because nobody can afford not solling chips. Even if they are below production cost. Also they cant just "mothball" a fab until the demand is large again because to ramp production and yield to normal l
      • I agree that they don't just mothball a FAB. However they do retool to other product so one product is running in the head of the fab while the last of the old product is completing in the back end. Sometimes they do mothball a fab to re-tool. Intel held on to the 858 process past it's planned end of life (8 inch aluminum interconnect tech) due to the demand for the Pentium III chips. They eventualy migrated FAB 20 to the 860 process (faster copper interconnects). Fabs can and do adjust the downtime fo

  • DRAM is veeeery cheap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:39AM (#5935638)
    I don't understand the problem. 1GB (2x512MB) of PC2700 DDR memory can be bought under $100.

    DoJ should investigate OS or Office suite price fixing instead. These are horribly overpriced.

  • Common misconceptions about commodities&RAM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Monday May 12, 2003 @07:44AM (#5935657) Journal
    I think there are common misconceptions:

    A) Memory is NOT a commodity at least by definition - nor is it a service. I DO think it should be listed on stock markets as such though. I think DRAM, a "combined finished product", would have to be rewritten as a raw material. I think if there were this type of regulation, rather than regulation on small arms of companies like Samsung, there would be more stabilization. Contrary to what the article makes it seem like though, I think RAM has been VERY reasonable, it has also been been a help to a partial turn around in PC sales over the past 2 years, by helping margins.

    There are also a lot of companies producing RAM, at least more than enough for capatilist competition. I can name at least 6 seperate manufacturers off the top of my head. We don't see the same problem in industries where there is less competition. ( Samsung, Hyundai, Motorola, Kingston, Centon(Kbyte) PNY )

    2)The area of concentration for price fixing shouldn't be DRAM it should be FlashRAM. As far as I can tell, this type of RAM is outselling DRAM at this point. (If someone could post a link to comparisons it would be appreciated) I haven't seen compareable Flash RAM decreases. The interesting thing about Flash RAM is that it appears to be cheaper to make and easier to sell. There are also LOTS of competition. Most people can't see through the gimmicky 30x 70x flash RAM, and most don't buy into the Kingston, Viking theory of better RAM. (Novices will not attribute their computer problems to bad RAM they got for $10 after rebate)

    IF RAM were made a commodity you'd see it traded like crude oil. Venezuelan and British oil do better because of the refining process. The "clear gas" at Amoco really is better than than the gas from Texaco! The RAM from Kingston really is better than the RAM from KByte.

    • ...and DRAM (unlimited write cycles) is better than FlashRAM (well-understood limited number of write cycles possible.)

      But you're right. It's all a conspiracy, not the physical reality that FLASH memory can only be written to a limited number of times before it fails randomly....
      • Flash RAM write cycles now number in the several millions. For the vast majority of applications, this works out just fine. Flash is generally built to use the entire bank of RAM before beginning again at the start, thus limiting the number of writes per sector.

        An easy example: let's assume you're a terrific shutterbug, using a 64 Mbyte Flash SD card in your digital camera. You are photographing at 2000x2000 or something, so each jpeg is about a megabyte. Assuming you take 64 photos a day, every day, f

  • This is a joke, right? Right?!? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fefe ( 6964 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @08:00AM (#5935728) Homepage
    Come one, RAM manufacturers are in deep trouble, and have been for many months if not years. RAM prices have fallen to their lowest point in history, much stronger even than CPU prices have tumbled.

    How can anyone claim they "kept the prices high"?!

    Or more interesting: Are they going to smoke it all alone or are they going to pass it around?

    • Bound to happen (Score:2, Insightful)

      by wumpus2112 ( 649012 )
      If you read the industry mags, you will note that all the analysts basically say "get your act together and start fixing prices like everyone else". The DRAM industry is probably the only business in the US that actually allows a free market, and this is considered completely unnatural.

      Sooner or later they will manage to fix prices, and you will be able to tell by consistant profits by memory manufacturers.

      Remember the first lesson in business 101 is never be forced to compete. Read Warren Buffet's ad

  • Poor Dell, but they are really rich! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12, 2003 @08:01AM (#5935733)
    Well, I looked into 2Gig of DDR memory for a Dell 8500 laptop. The price is $3300. If you go to Microns crucial website it is $999/gig. This is about 99 cents per gig which is cheap compared to the 60% markup Dell wants on the stuff. So! poor Dell can't make a buck because memory isn't cheap enough. Sheesh! gimme a break Dell. You say it amounts to 5-6% of the PC cost which is $150 on a $3K laptop. Hmmm, maybe you need to redo the math. Micron is trying to make an honest buck while you are doing highway robbery! Now who has to get their quaterly earnings up, Micron is at $9 per share whilst' Dell is at $30 per share. Hmmm, something doesn't compute here. In fact with all the announced Intel price decreases and chip decreases I wonder why Dell doesn't reduce their laptop/workstation website price. Seems like Dell is the one doing price fixing to me since other competitors are very few -- down to about two left. This means that Dells prices will not come down but only go up!

    • Yeah...Dell regularly charges about 2-3 times the going rate for
      memory. Now they are designing some new machines (see Inspiron 8500)
      where only 1 slot is customer accessible, meaning the other slot has to
      have factory installed memory in it. Which ties you to them for
      at least half your memory. I priced it out on the 8200 and the machine
      would have been about 25% cheaper if I bought minimal memory and
      added it after market.

      I think Dell is on the edge of a cliff -- their service level is
      declining, their techn

  • Taiwan Mafia (Score:5, Funny)

    by it0 ( 567968 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @08:12AM (#5935789)
    I always found it suspicious that everytime RAM prices came down, the factory was on fire, blown away by tornado, or was hit by an earthquake. It was like they really had a bad case of Sim City.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @08:36AM (#5935898)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I've got a boxful of 72pin SIMMs.. about 350mb worth. When I get my time machine working, I'm gonna go back to 1994 and sell it for $16,000.

      Or maybe to 1984 and get $16,000,000 :)

    • I remember back in the 1970's -- before this nasty price fixing -- when you could buy an Altair S-100 1K RAM card assembled and tested for only $139. So, if you needed 512MB of RAM, it would only have required 524,288 of those S-100 boards and the cost would have been a mere $72,876,032.00.

      Now those bastards are gouging us with their price fixing. I just checked on Crucial's web site and 512MB (DDR PC2100) costs $65.99!

      By your logic, if RAM prices went up to $1000/MB tomorrow, it still wouldn't be price

  • Whiners! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 )
    Remember when DRAM was $40 a MEGABYTE?!?!
    • I do. I paid $40/mb in 1994, and that was a good deal.

      In my parts closet I've got a 286 motherboard with a whopping 4mb RAM (all in socketed DIPP chips). The guy who gave it to me recounted having to scrounge thru all the memory dealers to find enough chips, and spending $400 in the pricess.

  • DRAM OPEC (Score:4, Insightful)

    by moojin ( 124799 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @09:08AM (#5936115)
    i've always wondered why the major memory chip producers did not create an OPEC type consortium for DRAM. they would be able to control the price of ram chips and hopefully hold it at a level that would be cheap enough to ensure brisk sales, while ensuring that they would make enough profit to a) keep their workers employeed all of the time, b) keep their production lines running at a certain capacity, c) be able to invest in memory chip technology.

    the DRAM constortium could raise the prices on memory chips to a point where consumers would find it too expensive to buy chips, but a) the smaller manufacturers could offer cheaper products b) like OPEFC the consortium does not want to alienate its consumers through higher prices.

    on another note, "Regarding the latter "conspiracy", the three main culprits appear to be Samsung and Hynix, both of Korea; and Taiwan's Nanya." though these three companies are geographically more closely located than the other major companies, it does not necessarily mean that they would want to devise a plan to price fix. don't airlines in the U.S. price fix also?
  • What concerns me is the price fixing going in with gasoline. All the gas stations in my area always jack up the prices on the same day, and they're always the same price. There's no way that's not collusion! I only buy RAM once a year or so, but I have to buy gas once a week. I buy way more gas than RAM, so RAM price fixing doesn't concern me as much.

  • Price fixing? What price fixing? (Score:3, Informative)

    by daperdan ( 446613 ) * on Monday May 12, 2003 @09:31AM (#5936296)
    http://www.converge.com/eWebApp/jsp/pricetrends/Ca tegoryDescDetail.jsp
    Take a look at the graphs on this page. The only segment of the market that appears to be climbing is the PC100 and PC133 products. This is common for products as they are phased out of production. I'd say the author picked a poor time to post this article. DRAM makers like Micron won't be able to survive if the current pricing continues.

    It might be a little more fun to vilify a company like Rambus which is suing it's way to profitability, bending all consumers over with it's illegal obtained patent portfolio. (allegedly)
  • WTH does 1 dollar per DRAM Chip mean? They make it for one dollar? And is this reguardless of the memory density of the chip.

    I'm assuming that they're speaking of the chips themselves and not the assembled DRAM Bank chips on PCB ready to be put into computers.
  • I don't know if its tough times, the recent bad business press, Microsoft, or what, but it seems like the entire business world is being run by the Mafia, only with less ostentatious taste in clothes and a little less violence.

    It's all about fixing prices, monopolies, screwing your employees, cheating investors, lining your own pockets, lying and stealing.

    Have I suddenly just woken up from a dream world where businesses worked to build better products because better products sold better and made for happi
  • Quote from article about the memory monopoly -

    Dell Computer Corp. chairman Michael Dell has publicly voiced his displeasure at excessive consolidation in the DRAM business, which has 40 percent fewer players now than in the mid-1990s. And Dell has voted with his checkbook: In early June Dell Computer and Taiwan's Nanya signed a five-year agreement that calls on Nanya to supply up to $3 billion worth of DRAM modules to Dell.

    Yeah, we really need to worry about those mem prices , because they are killer wh

  • The article does not make a compelling case that there has been any anti-competitive behavior by the DRAM companies. In a competitive market, prices of different suppliers will converge: this is to be expected and is not evidence that anything anti-competitive is occurring. Withholding goods for sale in the hopes that prices will go up is also fine. Hopefully, there's not a supplier in a market with monopoly power, and the DRAM market is competitive enough that there is no such supplier. Now, if the sup
  • According to RAM Price Index [priceindexes.com], RAM prices have been generally dropping for the past five months.

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