According to Reuters Beijing January 15 reports, After a year and a half of soaring prices of some storage chips, a sudden drop, coupled with disappointing fourth-quarter profit forecasts released by Samsung Electronics, panic investors betting that the chip industry will flourish for at least a year .
The chip market has already begun to lose some momentum.High-end flash memory chips are widely used in smart phones, and its price has fallen by nearly 5% in the fourth quarter.Some analysts now expect, The chip industry's growth rate will drop by more than half this year to 30%.
This led Samsung shares fell 7.5% last week, its local rival SK Hynix shares fell 6.2%But analysts said it is unlikely that this will lead to a sudden crash in the chip market, which should have been relatively stable for 2018 for chipmakers.
The memory chip industry has reached $ 122 billion in size and has experienced unprecedented rapid growth since mid-2016, with nearly 70% growth in 2017 alone, thanks to strong growth in smartphones and cloud services as they There is a need for higher performance chips that can store more data.
After years of consolidation, the number of chipmakers has dropped from just about 20 in the mid-1990s to just a few, and the supply of chips has become more compliant. "If demand remains strong and server needs remain viable, memory chips The price is likely to gradually decline this year, "said Lee Jae-yun, an analyst at Yuanta Securities in Korea.
However, 30% growth is still a strong growth for the volatile chip industry, with the chip market still in its longest period of booming in 6% in 2016.
Analysts said last year's explosive growth in the chip industry provided cash to chipmakers to reinvest and increase capacity, NAND flash memory chip supply will grow 43% this year, up from 34% last year, will result in a price drop of about 10% .Calculation of capacity growth is expected to be mainly led by Western Digital, Toshiba and Micron and other companies, these companies are trying to catch up with the market leader Sheep Samsung, which controls about 40% of the flash memory chip market.
Investment firm Macquarie expects the operating profit margin of Samsung's chip division to grow from 26.5% in 2016 to 47% last year and then further to 55.5% this year.
By the end of December last year, the China Daily claimed that the China Development and Reform Commission is closely watching the surge in the prices of mobile storage chips and may investigate possible price fixing actions by Samsung and other chipmakers.
Data from chip price tracking firm DRAMeXLG show that more than 50% of Samsung's storage business revenue came from the Chinese market in 2017. 'Although the supply-demand relationship remains stable, the pressure from customers to lower their prices makes the future development of the market difficult to predict, Samsung Securities analyst MS Hwang said.
