TrendForce and TechNews jointly held “Compuforum 2016: The Future of Mobile Devices” on May 31 at the fourth-floor VIP room of Taipei International Conventional Center, as part of the Computex Taipei 2016. This year’s conference featured guest speakers from SanDisk, the global leader in Flash memory solutions, and other major international brands such as Qualcomm and NXP.
Two major IC packaging/testing providers based in Taiwan, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), signed a joint share-exchange memorandum of understanding on May 26 to establish a new holding company. According to the memorandum, each common ASE share will be swapped for a 0.5 share of the holding company, while each common SPIL share will be sold to the holding company at a price of NT$55.
In the mainstream PC-Client OEM SSD market for the second quarter, the average contract prices of TLC- and MLC-based products respectively fell 4~11% and 6~10% compared with the prior quarter, according to DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. Looking ahead to the third quarter, the overall supply-demand situation in the NAND Flash market may become more balanced.
In the first quarter of this year, the average contract price of NAND Flash chip fell by about 10% compared with the previous quarter due to persistant market oversupply. During the same period, the prices of eMMCs and Client-SSDs also dropped 13~18% quarterly as a result of steep decline in shipments of smartphones, tablets and notebooks.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, reports that the global DRAM industry posted US$8.56 billion in revenue in this first quarter, down 16.6% from the previous quarter. Market oversupply and sliding average selling price were the main culprits behind the revenue decline.