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"RAM is going to AI: OpenAI has secured up to 40% of the market." https://globalcio.com/news/16062/ You're maybe talking about the spot market, but companies are free to make any sort of supply contract.
AI slop article
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
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Amazon was wildly profitable on a unit cost basis from relatively early on. They didn’t show profits on paper because they reinvested everything into their capital buildout to reduce costs even more.
I thought Amazon was selling quite a few items at a loss to undercut competition early on?
A notable example where they ate $ millions in losses is the Diapers.com story [1] [2].
[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-am...
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That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority. Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals? If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look…
If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
Whenever China is mentioned, it's always about government subsidies, as if Samsung didn't receive government subsidies when it was developing
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If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a dec…
This feels like a classic business blunder. Focus hard on a single business segment, leaving an opening in the market for your competitors. Not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough for you, right now. Only downside is that now you've created an opening for a new player in the market. This feels like a short coming of western business/stock market thinking. Focusing on profit within th…
It's not really a blunder though. Given that total capacity is tightly constrained, Samsung and SK Hynix are happy to focus on what they do at their best and with the highest margins. Why shouldn't they supply the HBM market?
This is why we have strategy reserves - to avoid greedy companies to make a quick buck when they find out they can sell the equivalent of crack and dump all the other now low margin stuff like food or other essentials.
Sure, that company might make a killing for a short while, but people will die from hunger, missing medicine or freeze to death.
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It's not really a blunder though. Given that total capacity is tightly constrained, Samsung and SK Hynix are happy to focus on what they do at their best and with the highest margins. Why shouldn't they supply the HBM market?
Maybe not to starve whole segments of the society and economy of critical inputs ? This is why we have strategy reserves - to avoid greedy companies to make a quick buck when they find out they can sell the equivalent of crack and dump all the other now low margin stuff like food or other essentials. Sure, that company might make a killing for a short while, but people will die from hunger, missing medicine or freeze…
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> The downside in general is that other countries lose production capacity in steel, heavy industry, semiconductors, machine tools etc - industries that took decades to build and can't be easily replaced. That's not really what happens though. You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special niches within the overall industry because (1) you can afford to, while low-cost competitors can't an…
> You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special niches within the overall industry That's not what people mean by "lose" capacity. Suppose DRAM companies expand capacity because prices are high, then demand levels off, the price crashes, and they all go out of business except for the one in China which gets a government bailout. That's fine, right? We're not interested in making DRAM, tha…
We are seeing that with some rare earths, even tho china is back into exporting them (except to japan, I think?) everyone is looking for alternatives already. They may have killed their industry 10 years down the line for playing with the export lever a bit too much.
Just like how markets punish the ram cartel creating a chance for cxmt and ymtc to enter. It would create a chance for western companies to do the same if china messes with the markets they have "cornered".
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You're always at someone 's mercy in any industry with significant barriers to entry, you might as well pick a low-cost supplier.
That is such a defeatist position... How about regulation?
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> It is wise for these Chinese fabs to eventually use a very aggressive dumping strategy to price well below cost push out other players forever, especially in DRAM. It's not dumping, it's the opposite. Sam Altman's stunt has created massive amounts of fictitious demand (OpenAI isn't using those wafers it's ordering) and triggered massive panic-buying from everyone else. Prices are arteficially high, this has turboch…
Why would they bother to invade Taiwan when they’re winning economically and diplomatically? Public opinion in Taiwan is rapidly changing towards peaceful re-unification and no one anywhere on earth trust the US will help them with anything.
It would be very surprising to me that taiwan people think a reunification is feasable while the CCP still exists, just see how things are going in HK to see what would be waiting taiwan if they reunite.