Chinese vendor roars up memory module charts

FIGURES RELEASED by market firm iSuppli show that a Chinese memory module vendor made huge strides in grabbing market share last year.

But Ramaxel's growth was somewhat outshone by familiar vendor TwinMOS - it grew sales by 127 per cent last year, compared to the Chinese vendor which managed 85 per cent growth.

Ally Liao, analyst at iSuppli, said Ramaxel is a direct OEM for Lenovo and also supplies modules to HP. The growth in TwinMOS' share was due to its cooperation with Chinese disties. Liao estimates that the global DRAM module market will reach $31 billion in 2007, a modest growth figure of 2.4 per cent over last year.

But the movement in the ranks hasn't affected Kingston, which continues to dominate the module market. Liao said its ambitions are dual - to control the memory industry and to keep its costs down. It has huge purchasing power and behaves more like an OEM and so can influence the price of modules.

Another winner last year was PQI, which managed to grow its share by 113 per cent as a result of an alliance with Janese based Asset Managers Group.

The figures in the table below, courtesy of iSuppli, show rankings in 2006 by revenue in millions of US dollars. µ

2006	2005	Vendor	06 Rev	06 share	05 Rev	05 share
1	1	Kingston	2210	18.1%	1475	16.70%
2	2	Smart	668	5.5%	483	5.46%
3	7	Ramaxel	648	5.3%	325	3.68%
4	3	A-Data	618	5.1%	453	5.12%
5	13	TwinMOS	494	4.0%	418	4.73%
6	4	Crucial	476	3.9%	355	4.02%
7	16	PQI	431	3.5%	202	3.68%
8	8	Corsair	425	3.5%	317	3.59%
9	5	Apacer	381	3.1%	355	4.02%
10	12	Transcend	359	2.9%	229	2.59%
11	9	Wintec	278	2.3%	250	2.83%
		Others	6708	54.9%	4611	52.20%
		Total	12229	100%	8833	100%