Market quiet so far this week.

US market is down / Europe still weak

The US DRAM spot market has been negatively affected by the outlook for the stock market and the fading confidence in economic recovery. DRAM spot market activity has slowed down, and price have begun to weaken somewhat. The Europe market is still in the gloomy PC season right now, although the consumer market seems to show signs of coming back.

HongKong market also down

The Mainland China Government has been very aggressive recently on smuggled goods from Hong Kong, and therefore the Hong Kong DRAM spot market has quieted down. Hong Kong's DRAM spot market is major trading market for the mainland China. Some DRAM brokers probably sold some goods in the HongKong local market (without too a high margin) since they were not able to smuggle those products into Mainland China.

Taiwan market -wait

Taiwan spot marketers are still trading, but it has been an obvious buyers' market for the past two days. Transaction levels have slowed down. Module makers have enough inventories for rest of this month already and can wait for better entry prices.

Most of DDR outputs have been booked.

DDR output for this month from DRAM makers have been booked out by OEM customers and module makers (mosly only long-term business relationship module makers). DRAM makers still claiming they do no't have excess products to sell to spot market. So, the spot market price is dependent on the channel players (traders, brokers and distributors) for the rest of month.

Intel is pulling forward price cutting to August and September

Intel will pull the price cutting forward to August and September for CPUs and chipsets. The CPU price discount should be around 10% to 15% at 1.7G and 1.8G. The major purpose is to clean the inventory below 2.0G product line. Chipsets should be reduced approximately $3. Looking to boost demand for low-end PCs.

Price shows weak at this week

Although Motherboard shipments are still showing good results through the 3rd week of July and there is expectations that the CPU price will be lowered, DRAM spot prices are still not being stimulated immediately. Prices for this week will probably continue to weaken a little bit after the too rapid rise over the past few weeks.