Add on memory modules get price hike

Two Japanese companies have taken a unilateral decision to raise the price of add on memory modules for PCs from the beginning of this month. Melco and IO Data Devices raised the price of their 64Mb and 128Mb modules by around 20 per cent, suggesting that demand for servers which use the parts is great. Roy Taylor, joint managing director of Vanguard Microelectronics UK, said: "There are certain products where there is a genuine shortage. In particular, 256Mb server modules are in short supply." He said that 64Mb parts were still in relatively good supply and he thought that the Japanese companies were making "a pre-emptive strike" on this segment of the market. The 128Mb PC 100 parts, however, were in short supply, he said. Hugh Jenkins, enterprise product manager at Compaq UK, said: "We've seen our mix of memory modules shift throughout the year from 64Mb, to 128Mb, to 256Mb and above." That, he said, was not driven by the cost of memory, but by software applications including SAP, Oracle and other similar products which performed better the more memory they could use. According to the reports, this is the first price rise Melco and IO Data Devices has made in the last 18 months. ®