Commodity chip pricing seen up

TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Riding on shortages and resulting price hikes for memory chips, the average global pricing for commodity electronic components is likely to jump by 2.3 per cent sequentially in the third quarter of year 2009.

This is being foreseen by research firm iSuppli, which said the price increase in this area is having an inordinate impact on overall component costs.

DRAM, in fact, accounted for 9.1 per cent of global semiconductor revenues in 2008.

“Overall, component pricing is being heavily impacted by price hikes for DRAM, spurred by a shortage of DDR3 parts. Overall DRAM pricing is expected to rise by 10.2 per cent in the third quarter," a Digitimes report quoted Eric Pratt, vice president, pricing and competitive analysis, at iSuppli as saying.

He said other areas seeing price increases include analog ICs, discretes and filters. The iSuppli forecast has also revealed that overall prices are expected to undergo a short-term rise in the third quarter. This follows plummeting trends, which showed declines of 8.4 per cent in fourth-quarter 2008, 9.2 per cent in first-quarter 2009 and 5 per cent in second-quarter 2009.

It also pointed out that most components are most likely to witness price declines in the third quarter, but the average is being skewed by DRAM. The estimate is that prices might come back to dips in the fourth quarter, with a moderate 0.2 per cent decrease.