[News] Samsung will eat Chipzilla in second quarter

[StyM]

http://fudzilla.com/news/processors/...second-quarter

The days of Intel being the world's largest chipmaker will be over in the second quarter as the mighty Chipzilla has been felled by Samsung.

Nomura Securities said the South Korean consumer electronics maker will likely generate sales of $15.1 billion from semiconductors in the April through June period, higher than the $14.4 billion Intel is expected to have in the same time frame.

Nomura analyst CW Chung thinks Samsung will be the larger chipmaker with sales of $63.6 billion compared to Intel?s estimated $60.5 billion. One of the drivers of Samsung?s chip growth is the increasing prices of memory chips, which are found in everything from smartphones to servers.

?In the mobile era, demand for D-Ram [a type of memory chip] and SSDs [solid state drives] has surged, boosting their prices since last year amid tight supply,? said, an analyst at , in the report. ?The memory chip market has grown bigger than the CPU market,? he said.

DRAM chip prices increased 25 percent in the first half of 2017, while NAND flash memory chip prices jumped 15 percent.

Chung thinks average selling prices will continue to increase in the third quarter. But it's not just sales that are expected to surpass Intel. Nomura is forecasting Samsung will have more of a profit from its chips than Intel during the second quarter, to the tune of $6.6 billion compared to Intel?s $3.9 billion.

[Levish]

about time for a price fixing investigation on DRAM / Flash prices :p

[Sparky]

Demand has been high. Why is it every time prices go up due to high demand that people start whining about price fixing? We had dirt cheap prices at one point because of supply glut and lower demand. That wasn't normal.

Don't get me wrong, I want the lower prices, and they'll come back at some point.