Attention in the spot market was shifted from DRAM to NAND flash this week (March 1-5) as some traders offloaded their inventories of NAND flash chips from Hynix Semiconductor, according to inSpectrum.
The weak NAND flash pricing continued this week. As of the noon session of March 5, 16Gb and 32Gb multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash had dropped 5% and 3% to US$3.89 and US$7.08, respectively.
Some traders were offloading 32Gb MLC NAND flash chips from Hynix's 41nm process in the channel. As quotations of these chips were about 7% lower than street prices, overall pricing went down, inSpectrum said.
Module houses were reluctant to adopt Hynix 41nm NAND flash, which is packaged differently from ordinary NAND chips. The module houses would have to change their designs and increase their costs if they adopted Hynix's 41nm chips. Seeing the weak, traders offloaded the Hynix chips in the channel at low prices, inSpectrum explained.
The overall NAND flash spot market has been slow after the Lunar New Year holidays, partly because of weak demand and partly because of a labor shortage hitting many USB drive and memory card makers in China, inSpectrum said.
For the DRAM spot market, overall pricing changed little this week. As of the noon session of March 5, 1Gb DDR2 and DDR3 stood at US$2.41 and US$2.67, respectively, representing a less than 1% change throughout the week.
Market activities slowed down this week as the recent price surge has been driven by speculative trading, inSpectrum noted. Once traders/brokers found it difficult to boost price, there was price correction, the firm explained.