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Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail
Apple flash order rocks market
IF APPLE has placed an order for 100 million 8Gb NAND chips, as reports suggest, it could cause supply problems and raise prices in an already unsteady market.
Contract prices for Flash memory have already increased by 16 per cent in recent weeks and an order of this magnitude can only make matters worse for an industry struggling under the weight of fab closures caused by the financial downturn.
And with other electronics giants like Sony and Nokia stacking up their inventories, it looks like there will be stormy times ahead for flash makers, at least that's what Taiwanese sources are telling Digitimes.
But all of this could be good news for Apple fans as the chips will, in all lilkelihood, end up in the new Iphone, widely expected to be announced at Apple's developer conference in June. µ
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This economic downcrunch redepression thing just keeps getting worse and worse.
Now of all things Apple has placed an order to buy chips from a company.
This could be devastating as buying things (AKA stuff) will only accellerate the downward spiral back towards the barbarism of the 1990's. Oh, and the impending doom of our species.
I don't get it. How is Apple buying 100mil chips a bad thing for the chip industry?
Isn't this the sort of thing they need right now?
Smartphones should help the tech sector ride out the recession. People "need" their mobile phones, and a regular contract upgrade path should help business.
You folks above are missing the point- increased demand and shorter supply means much lower pricing power and lower fab utilizations! In bizarro world!
The only real problem is if this causes a bubble - while you can build out more factory capacity, once the demand from Apple goes away you are back into an situation of over-supply. So you have to walk a fine line between building out too much capacity for the long term or not builing out enough and pissing off your customers. In any event, short term this should be good for the memory folks as it will give them pricing power and let them run their fabs at higher utilizations.