These darn foreigners, he said, why, they were dumping cheap DRAM chips on the American market.
When the Japanese dumped DRAM chips onto the American market in the mid-1980s, the U.S. won hugely.
The bets that Samsung Electronics placed on DRAM chips, liquid-crystal display screens and mobile telephones paid off handsomely.
And within a few weeks DRAM chips started to get much more expensive.
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The prices fetched for DRAM chips, which are used widely in personal computers and other products, are still well below their cost of production.
Weak global demand for PC DRAM chips still weighed on Samsung's push for a recovery, although it responded to increased orders for server and mobile DRAM and hastened migration to the 30-nanometer and below process.
Weaker-than-expected off-peak season demand and a global supply crunch of HDDs coupled with low demand for PC DRAM chips and the oversupply of mobile DRAM impacted profit margins, in which the memory portion saw its revenue slip to 4.89 trillion won.
Prices of DRAM memory chips fell to their lowest prices on the year in December, according to market research firm iSuppli.
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And when we speak of Silicon Valley today, we are talking about their attitude, not the fact that they made 16K bit CMOS DRAM memory chips.
This February, the sales of DRAM memory chips, a type used extensively in PCs, rose by nearly 24% compared with the previous month, as prices continued to rise.
Clear gainers include Intel, which produces 85% of all microprocessors, and the makers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips such as Japan's NEC and Toshiba and South Korea's Samsung Electronics, LG Semicon and Hyundai Electronics.
But memory manufacturers have balked at having to make bigger, more expensive Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) chips when their existing lines of SDRAM were beginning to turn profitable after an industrywide downturn.
He also noted that chip factory utilization rates have declined to slightly below-seasonal levels, and that contract prices for both DRAM and NAND memory chips are expected to drop in Q3, due to weak PC and smartphone demand.
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Likewise, if DRAM ever loses out to magnetic memory, cache chips will decline alongside it.
Power-hungry parts see even more of a boost: they can carry Iris Pro graphics with embedded DRAM, which should double the 3D speed on H-series mobile chips (47-55W of typical power) and triple it for the R-series (around 65-84W) on the desktop.
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