Fire accident at SK Hynix fab causes DRAM price hike

DRAMeXchange has reported the fire accident experienced by SK Hynix's Wuxi plant has led to a sudden surge in market demand. DRAMeXchange said the spot market prices for mainstream PC DRAM 2Gb chips have soared by a whopping 36% since the day of the fire (the calculation is based on the chip's agreed price of $US 2.18 on 9/24). Following are the other points from the DRAMeXchange' release on this subject: A growth of at least 10%, it is worth noting, is also expected for the soon-to-be-announced September contract prices. Given that SK Hynix was originally the supplier with the highest market share in the graphics memory market (leading both Samsung and Micron), a major shortage in graphics DRAM (for instance, DDR3x16, GDDR3, and GDDR5) has inevitably occurred. The Taiwanese companies with noticeable, though much lower, shares in this market include Nanya and Winbond. Graphic memories have, since the very beginning, belonged to a niche market, with price movements that generally correlate strongly with those of PC DRAM. Given that their supplies had traditionally always remained steady, a habit has never really been developed on the part of many manufacturers to maintain a "safety" inventory level for their graphics-based memory products. In the periods following the Wuxi plant fire accident as well as the heightened uncertainty in the supply side, SK Hynix's ability t...