Toshiba officially announced today that its memory business will be spun off. Although the detail is not disclosed yet, but overall the procedure will be completed by March 31st . DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, believes that from this point on, Toshiba’s memory business will have more operational flexibility and stronger fundraising ability. These advantages in the long run will benefit the Toshiba-Western Digital alliance in the forms of expansion in NAND Flash production capacity and increased efficiency in storage product development.
The global smartphone production volume for 2016 grew 4.7% annually to reach 1.36 billion units in total, according to market research firm TrendForce. Samsung continued to top the annual global ranking despite the discontinuation of Galaxy Note 7, suffering a marginal decline of 3.3% compared with the 2015 figure. Chinese brands Huawei, OPPO and Vivo respectively occupied the last three spots in the global top five and followed closely behind the second-place Apple.
At the start of the first quarter of 2017, contract prices of server DRAM modules have already increased by over 25% on average from the same point in the prior quarter, according to the latest report by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. The sequential contract price increases for some high-density server DRAM modules are even at nearly 30%. The average worldwide contract price of DDR4 R-DIMM 32GB modules has broken through the threshold of US$200, while the 16GB counterparts have also climbed to about US$100.
The LED chip subsidiary of China’s major LED supplier San’an Optoelectronics has just announced an 8% price hike for some its products that will take effect on January 10, 2017. Following four major waves of price increases implemented by participants in the global LED industry during 2016, San’an Opto is now leading another major price adjustment at the start of 2017. LEDinside, a division of TrendForce, believes that the main factor behind these price hikes is the rising costs of raw materials in the upstream of the supply chain, while warming demand and extremely low quotes also made the price increases more noticeable. LEDinside furthermore expects the material and manufacturing costs will play a central role in the pricing among industry players.
The latest analysis by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, finds that average selling prices of various categories of DRAM products will increase significantly in the first quarter of 2017 as they continue to experience tight supply. The general price upswing that began in the second half of 2016 therefore will persist into the first quarter of this year despite the period being the traditional off-peak season. The contract prices of DDR3 4GB PC DRAM modules have reached a high of above US$25, and prices of DRAM products will see an estimated sequential quarterly increase of more than 30% on average, which would be a new record for the off-peak season.