Roll-up for the Amazing Micron DRAM inventory fire sale

Micron is conducting a DRAM fire-sale, after stock levels ballooned by two weeks. But don’t all rush at once. The US memory maker is gouging prices only for major PC OEMs. It hopes this will be enough to persuade these customers to swap from 32MB to 64MB onboard memory on budget PC lines. With inventory now standing at seven weeks, according to EBN (which broke the story), Micron plainly has a lot of DRAM to shift. In turn this will have a big knock-on effect on other memory manufacturers, which will have to cut their prices to compete. No wonder, the industry is unable to establish a reasonable floor for DRAM prices. And no wonder prices keep on falling. The irony of it is that Micron got itself into this mess by doing exactly what it frequently accuses Korean vendors of doing -- making the DRAM glut worse by overproducing. Micron was the agent of its own inventory misfortune. It pumped up DRAM manufacturing volumes earlier this year even though the market was already in oversupply mode. Micron is churning out as much as 47 million MB DRAMs a month, according to analysts quoted by EBN. ®