Japanese scale back chip production
Japanese memory chip manufacturers continue to reduce both investment and production against a backdrop of falling prices.
Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Japanese memory chip manufacturers continue to reduce both investment and production against a backdrop of falling memory chip prices.
NEC plans to cut monthly production of its 16MB dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips by about 30 percent from an earlier estimate of 12 million to 13 million chips at the end of this year, Japan's Kyodo News Service reported today.
This follows similar moves in July by NEC, Hitachi, and Samsung Electronics. These companies cut production of 4MB DRAM and 16MB DRAM chips due to a drop in U.S. demand and lower prices.
Some observers believe demand may start rising by year's end, a peak sales season, but a major increase is unlikely because of large inventories.