Samsung gets to the top of the DRAM market

BEANCOUNTERS at Isuppli have said that Samsung's aggressive investment in advanced manufacturing technology has earned it a place at the top of the DRAM technology market.

In the report with the catchy title, "DRAM Market Surges in Q2; Samsung Boosts its Top Spot", Mike Howard, senior analyst for DRAM technology at Isuppli said all this investment in new technology had paid off in spades.

Samsung expanded its DRAM revenue by 24.3 per cent from $3.1 billion in the first quarter to $3.8 billion in the second quarter. This gave it the highest growth rate among the top five suppliers with a 35.4 per cent share of global DRAM revenue in the second quarter.

Howard said that Samsung's memory business long has pursued the cunning strategy of spending shedloads on new manufacturing processes. This meant that it was the first to move to advanced semiconductor process geometries, thus enabling the company to make semiconductors at a lower cost and at greater efficiency than its competitors, Howard said.

The fact the outfit has pushed into 40nm semiconductor lithography for DRAM manufacturing boosted the volume of its bit production dramatically. Meanwhile, Samsung's diverse DRAM product range including high-end devices, mobile and legacy parts allowed it to achieve an average selling price (ASP) higher than the industry average.

In the second quarter it produced 1.2 billion 1Gbit-density-equivalent DRAM units, up 13 per cent from 1.1 billion in the first quarter.

Howard said that DRAM sales were growing like topsy. DRAM industry revenue in the second quarter soared to $10.8 billion, up 14.4 per cent from $9.4 billion in the first quarter.

The second strongest growth among the top five DRAM suppliers was posted by Elpida Memory, which managed a 17.7 per cent increase in revenue to $1.9 billion, up from $1.4 billion in the first quarter.

Micron was the weakest among the top five DRAM suppliers in the second quarter, with revenue rising by 4.1 per cent to $1.43 billion, up from $1.38 billion in the first quarter. Micron struggled during the second quarter, likely due to manufacturing challenges at its Inotera facility.

Howard said, "Inotera has had the daunting task over the past few quarters of not only transitioning to the 50nm process node but also of migrating from Qimonda's trench technology to Micron's stack technology."

All this trouble is now behind it, and Inotera should be able to achieve outstanding bit growth for the duration of 2010, Howard said. µ