Out of all the large memory module manufacturers in Taiwan it’s just Transcend that has managed to stay in the black during the first half of 2008. Transcend is relatively small here in the North, but with the biggest sale of the period it managed to register a profit of $31 million. The biggest competition, A-DATA, sold almost the same amount of chips, but ended up with a loss of $10.6 million. Just one of the five big memory manufacturers managed to earn money due to the dropping DRAM prices, but also the price development on the NAND flash market.
The standardized 8Gb MLC (Multi-level cell) chips have dropped by over 42% during 2008 and have severely reduced the margins for the chip manufacturers. Both Apacer and PQI was close to making ends meet, with losses of $2.3 and $3.6 millions, while the fifth biggest, Kingmax, made a loss of $10 million, DigiTimes reports.
