Pattern has changed?

Quiet spot market

Recently spot market's activity is quite slow. No big orders, usually just some small quantity are on going. Price is still weak, slightly goes down a little bit everyday.

Contract will be still higher than Spot

It never happened to be such a long period of time for contract price higher than spot price in the history for the uptrend (in terms of the big picture/long term view). No matter is the supply side consolidation from the complete competition situation to the top 3 hold about 60% of market share to well control pricing strategy, or product mix/migration cause particular unbalance on the supply/demand in different product timing, or just simply supply side control the output.

Maybe OEM customers believe most forecast about the under-supply at 4Q or 2H of this year and try to keep the credit and relationship with DRAM makers right now and still to buy at the comparative lower price (compare with coming shortage) at less quantity? Or even worse - it's not an uptrend? It's just a flat-trend or even a slight downtrend? It's definitely a slight down in 2Q. Will it begin to be uptrend soon as most people hope in 3Q? However, it is true-Contract is higher than spot and seems like it will still keep this way for a while.

Contract quantity is also going down.

Even though contract is higher than spot, but the quantity is also doing down. Those OEM customers probably can't get enough qualified product from spot by the cheaper price, since spot market is still far behind the contract's volume. OEM also chooses the particular items to purchase from contract with a better offer for example 16x16 for last quarter. Even currently, not much 256Mb chip are free available on the spot market for anytime purchasing to deliver immediately.

Spot always indicator?

Is spot price always an indicator of the market price trend? Or history has been rewritten? Does the pattern already change after the millennium? It's too early to tell. We have to follow more long term trend for that.