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CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

koreaherald.com

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Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#231

Post by refulgentis »

christophilus wrote: post #213
refulgentis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work

From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#232

Post by zozbot234 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #229
zozbot234 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship. That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.

Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc. That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader pro…

China is very far from genuine rich-world standards though, especially if you look at the less developed inner provinces. The relatively tiny middle class they do have clearly lacks the incentive to demand any sudden change at present - they'd have way too much to lose. So we're still very much in the "authoritarian phase" of this whole dynamic.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#233

Post by zarzavat »

HauntingPin wrote: post #230
Yohvee7u wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's merely the marginalists at the WTO struggling to fit their beliefs that value is subjective and unkowable into the reality of commodity production.

Okay, so what official sources do you base your definition of price dumping on? Nobody is asking for your opinion on what you think price dumping is. This is a legally recognised thing, not just some random talking point.

The normal price is not the same as the market price. The normal price is what we had last year. The market price is higher than normal, due to a sudden demand spike and production shifting to HBM.

More manufacturing capacity coming online to return the price to normal is not dumping, it's how markets are supposed to operate.

Dumping would be e.g. if China used subsidies to sell DRAM at a price below what unsubsidised manufacturers can sell at, in an effort to push them out of the market.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#234

Post by PowerElectronix »

gchamonlive wrote: post #222
PowerElectronix wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the EU how that regulate everything policy is going for local manufacturing.

Is the answer to bad regulation to not regulate at all? How EU is regulating isn't the only way to do it. And is bad regulation that much worse than monopoly by the billionaires? There is no distinction. At least with bad regulation you always have the chance to vote better next time. Good luck dealing with oligarchs.

I wish we could regulate the oligarchs away, but it seems to me that is precisely the right amount of regulation that allows for oligarchs to thrive.

If you regulate to protect IP owners, and basically make them rentists, you create IP based monopolies and olygarchs. If you also regulate to prevent consumer, worker and industry sector abuse, you end up with a very stagnant economy a la europe.

If you don't regulate at all... I don't know what would happen, but it sure seems interesting to me.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#235

Post by adrian_b »

refulgentis wrote: post #231
christophilus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?

What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron.

The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.

Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.

The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#236

Post by jodrellblank »

throwaway290 wrote: post #167
bhouston wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that Samsung's business practices can be quite predatory. Basically if you have cool tech and you try to sell it to Samsung, you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be offered by them as a new product about a year later. At least this was the situation like a decade ago. I think this is because they are a huge conglomerate and there are d…

> you'll often get a few meetings and then they will go silent and then what you were trying to sell them will be offered by them as a new product about a year later This is how business works anywhere. there are no charities. whatever you say to investors or suppliers they can use so you better be careful have lawyers and set up correctly. (The caveat is of course when Chinese companies do this your lawyers can do n…

> “This is how business works anywhere. there are no charities.”

England and Wales have 171,000 registered charities. The USA has 1.6 million charities.

Not everyone is a business sociopath.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#237

Post by throwaway290 »

yehat wrote: post #227
throwaway290 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you talking about? since when Samsung suddenly become American? how many did South Korea bomb?

dude, you're way too excited. I understand your sentiment, but it applies for everyone these days. Just depends which propaganda you like more.

are you saying I'm wrong or what?)

let's recap. someone said Samsung feeds of subsidies so it's equally bad, I said no their government isn't as aggressive/imperialist, then multiple whataboutists started to imply I'm wrong because USA (not Samsung's gov by the way) is just as bad, and now you say... what exactly I don't even know.

still waiting for someone to give me an actual argument and not just downvotes.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#238

Post by refulgentis »

adrian_b wrote: post #235
refulgentis wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?

What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron. The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chines…

This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny.

"Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2].

"Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment.

"Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period.

"Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

"This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC.

The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share.

[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...

[4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat...

[5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6...

[6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820

[7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese...

[8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage

[9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p...

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#239

Post by adrian_b »

zozbot234 wrote: post #215
christophilus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.

The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg.

If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.

Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

#240

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #62
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The domestic industry is still there, only instead of mass-market DRAM it has started making higher-valued varieties of the same stuff. If there's a trade war, they can easily reconvert to making the mass-market stuff, just at much higher cost. You can't expect more than that, since they never really were as big or as low-cost as the lowest cost suppliers can be in normal times. That's not "losing" capacity, it's jus…

If the domestic industry had the capability of competing with China on mass-market goods at a profit but just chooses not to in order to pursue a higher-profitability niche, why not simply grow and do both at the same time, instead of yielding the mass market to China?

In my mind, if it can't do that, then it can't make the volume that China does at the cost that China does, which means it really isn't as capable as Chinese industry.

Perhaps at one time it could have, but those muscles have atrophied.

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