It wouldn't be a first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
True. From that page RAM companies have been sued and found innocent before:
“ The district court ruled in favor of Samsung, Hynix, and Micron and dismissed the lawsuit. This dismissal was affirmed on appeal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in March 2022 that the plaintiffs did not offer sufficient plausible evidence for their allegations to make a case under the Sherman Antitrust Act and that the district court properly dismissed the lawsuit.”
What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction? They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices. The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one com…
> The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.
No? Cost to produce won't be cheaper just because you have 5 fabs instead of 4. Economies of scale at some level just flatten out so company that chooses to not expand will just enjoy the same level of profit instead of increase
No, they suck. No swiping, no pull-to-refresh, no multitouch zoom, the calendars dropdowns are horrible to use, the buttons look like something out of Windows 3.1
If there is no agreement, then the magic term is "tacit collusion." Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices. That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happen…
Yeah your qualifier is important. If I have zyngots and suddenly the price goes through the roof, it is not collusion or illegal for me to raise my prices. Tacit collusion requires at least signaling. There has to be some intent. Like in the US rental market where Realpage coordinates tacit collusion. But if there is legitimately demand for far more memory than can be produced, it seems silly to claim collusion to ra…
Does conscious parallelism require signaling?
But yeah, if there's demand a limited supply, price increases from that are legit.
HBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's…
If there is no agreement, then the magic term is "tacit collusion." Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices. That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happen…
> Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. That's not how commodity markets work. This stuff is essentially sold at auction with the price set by supply and demand. The way they would fix the price is by constraining supply so that people have to outbid each other on a smaller amount of inventory. But that's not that hard to measure -- are they…
It's strange how people search for cartels where the basic laws of supply and demand are at work.
It seems to me, that such a simple concept should be better understood, especially in any market economy, where most of the people has sold something online and priced it somehow.
But alas, that's not what's happening, is this because of the discourse of "if I don't like something it's because of some evil corporation tries to squeeze me"? (many examples of those, but not all markets are Apple Iphones)
Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices. The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one com…
Oddly enough, Samsung and SK Hynix decided that they needed to expand production on the same day another lawsuit accused them of colluding to keep production low and prices high. > South Korea announces $520bn chip plant project with Samsung, SK Hynix https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors/south-k...
Or may be they just need to produce more, because the demand is higher than expected and looks like it will stay high to recoup their investment?
US is in a very advantageous position regarding geography and resources but its problem is that its geared towards having access to the whole worlds markets. Apple, Google etc. are all possible because they server billions of people, not just 350M. IMHO US will have serious internal trouble for years, eventually stabilizing and being a nice place again.
>Apple, Google etc. are all possible because they server billions of people, not just 350M Most of their revenue comes from America. Not all countries have the same profit margin per user.
Not true, less than half of Apple’s revenue is from US, %42 last year. Europe is %26, China %16.
memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a spe…
It’s a barrier, but not an insurmountable barrier. Most of the companies are somewhat lazy and somewhat cheap, but if circumstances change in the market, that make it untenable, they will take on making their own memory or making arrangements with someone else. It’s been done with processors, modems, SSDs and many other specialized chips. The design and engineering part can already be done at several companies, they…
So where are the German/France/UK/Australia/Turkey/Italy companies getting into this extremely profitable RAM business?
> There is, however, no incentive to do this when prices are high unless you expect competitors to do likewise This imagines a world where water production can be dialed up and down instantly, at no cost, with no risk. It doesn’t work that way though. Hiring people, scaling up factories, converting to 24/7 all have costs and risks. Just google (or Claude, or whatever) memory companies that went backrupt overbuilding…
> This imagines a world where water production can be dialed up and down instantly, at no cost, with no risk. It only images a world in which the profit-maximizing amount of wafer production is higher when demand is higher, which is a completely reasonable premise to take as the default. > Just google (or Claude, or whatever) memory companies that went backrupt overbuilding to meet a spike in demand. There are many.…
Wafer production is almost entirely fixed cost. Running a factory at 30% utilization costs about 80% of running at full capacity (source: former Intel).