NAND prices have increased since July, and that appears to have helped Samsung to increase its memory revenues in the past quarter. That comes as a welcome change!
As this post’s graphic illustrates the company has has seen downward-trending memory revenues for five of the past six quarters, but Q2 revenues increased by ten percent. Interestingly enough, the last quarter-to-quarter increase was a miniscule 0.3% one in Q2 of 2011. It looks as if growth tends to regularly occur in Samsung’s second quarter.
Last quarter’s revenue growth helps to debunk rumors that Samsung was trimming its NAND flash production to increase prices – an act that would have reduced revenues even if prices had climbed. It is more likely that the company may have redirected capacity away from DRAM, whose prices continue to decline, to NAND flash. This move, in addition to a flash price increase, could have contributed to the company’s revenue increase.
As The Memory Guy posted in July, Toshiba claims to have reduced production by 30% but there is little evidence that this was actually done. Objective Analysis has not run into any cases of Toshiba turning away business.
Will Samsung’s good news be followed by good news from other memory companies? I am inclined to believe that companies with more NAND than DRAM (SanDisk, Toshiba) will benefit the most from the recent price increase, but those with large DRAM revenues (Hynix, Micron) will see smaller revenue increases if any, and companies with DRAM but no NAND (Elpida, Powerchip, Promos, Rexchip, Nanya) will continue to experience declining revenues.
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