The iconic, annual conference hosted by global market research institute TrendForce is held today (31) in the VIP Room on the 4th floor of the Taipei International Convention Center: Compuforum 2019: The Big Future of Data Economics. Western Digital, Intel, Bigtera (subsidiary of Silicon Motion), DELL and other giants have been invited to the conference to focus on the development of storage solutions and emerging business opportunities in an era dominated by data economics and transformed by cloud. Senior Research Director Avril Wu and Senior Analyst Mark Liu at DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, also provide developmental insights into the DRAM industry of today, and dive deep into the upgrade trends characteristic of next-generation memories, servers and datacenters. And needless to say, seats were full and responses enthusiastic.
DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , says that besides the effects from the traditional offseason 1Q this year, the weakening demand in 4Q18 has pushed smartphone and server OEMs to begin adjusting their inventories. This in turn lowered sales bit performance across all products, causing overall NAND flash contract prices to see the most dramatic drop since 1Q18.
According to the latest investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, DRAM prices have faced mounting pressure to trend down in 1Q, the traditional offseason. Not only was this due to the production capacities added in 2H18, which found full expression in 1Q, but also a compressed procurement momentum by a demand side busy clearing out their own inventories. This caused a pronounced double-decline effect: Both DRAM prices and volume fell in 1Q, causing overall production revenue to drop by 28.6 % QoQ.
According to the newest statistics from TrendForce, judging from the falling phone sales 1Q19 impacted by the US-China trade dispute and the oversupply situation in memory markets, the total revenue of the top ten businesses in packaging and testing are predicted to stand at US$4.71 billion, a 11.8% decline YoY. Among the ten, Amkor, Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Tech (JCET), Tongfu Microelectronics (TFME), Tianshui Huatien (TSHT), Powertech and the United Test and Assembly Center (UTAC) all registered double digit declines in revenue for 1Q.
Whether DRAM or NAND Flash, current memory solutions are straining the physical limits of production processes, meaning it is becoming more and more difficult to keep on raising performance and lowering costs. Therefore, there has been much discussion revolving around Intel Optane and other next-generation memories in recent years, in hopes of discovering new solutions while keeping modifications to the current platform to a minimum or even leaving it completely untouched. DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , holds that next-generation memories and current solutions have their respective pros and cons, with prices forming the most critical areas of opportunity.