Nanya and Winbond benefit from rising demand and prices for July revenues

Dom

Both Taiwanese DRAM makers Nanya Technology and Winbond Electronics experienced month-on-month growth in July revenues, thanks to rising prices and robust demand, according to the companies.

Winbond, whose July revenues reached a high for this year at NT$2.622 billion, attributed the strong performance to increased shipments and average selling prices (ASPs), especially for motherboard-related IC products.

Demand for memory products has been rising in line with growing PC shipments worldwide, as the PC and information industries are transitioning into the high season after maintaining low inventories for the past two months, Winbond said.

Riding on the trend, Winbond said it expects further revenue growth in the second half of this year. The company also projects considerable growth in shipments of camera phone-use digital signal processors (DSPs) in the second half of the year, as it recently delivered samples to a number of new clients, the company said.

By October, Winbond’s accumulated DSP shipments for this year are expected to surpass one million units, the company said.

Charles Kau, Nanya’s spokesperson, also projected a bright future for the industry, saying that tight supply for DRAM products should last through year-end because of the traditional peak season and PC replacement demand.

Nanya shipped 17 million die in July and expects shipments to grow to 19 million units in September and 21 million in November. The company’s two 8-inch fabs, currently using 0.14-micron processing, will complete upgrades to 0.11-micron processing in the second half of 2004, according to Kau.

In the future, Nanya will continue to focus on the OEM market, even though its DRAM module prices in the retail market are about US$3-4 higher than those in the OEM market, Kau said. The company’s ratio of OEM and retail businesses is currently about 7:3, Kau said.

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Source: DigiTimes