A mild drop for both DRAM and NAND flash was seen across the board this week (January 18-22), driven by price reductions by some leading module houses, according to inSpectrum.

Spot prices for 1Gb DDR3 chips dropped by around 1-3% this week to close at US$2.92 as of the noon session of January 22. DDR2 posted a similar drop, closing at US$2.26 in the same period. Most vendors have quoted 1Gb DDR3 chips at around US$3.0-3.10 but deals were mostly settled below US$3.10, inSpectrum said.

The weakening price trend was mostly driven by mild price revisions at some module houses, who cut quotes for 2GB DDR2 and DDR3 by around 5%, thus discouraging demand in the channel, inSpectrum observed.

Demand was down for DDR3 at both spot and contract markets because module pricing as a proportion of overall system bill-of-material (BOM) costs, has edged to around 10%, inSpectrum explained.

For the NAND flash spot market, the price rebound seen last week proved to be temporary as a mild price drop was seen this week. Demand has remained still slow with some small-scale USB drive/memory card factories in China having moved forward their Lunar New Year breaks.

As of the noon session of January 22, spot prices for 16Gb multi-level cell (MLC) and 32Gb MLC NAND flash dropped 5% and 2% to US$4.44 and $7.63, respectively, inSpectrum noted.