IDC names Hyundai top DRAM vendor, over Samsung

Samsung bosses have damned a report by market researcher IDC that claims the company will have lost its position as top DRAM manufacturer by the end of the year, falling to number three in the chart. Displacing the Korean giant is Hyundai, fresh from its merger with LG Semicon and chucking out those chips to take 23.5 per cent of the market. The survey, based on IDC's predictions on the companies' year-end results and unit shipments of 64Mb parts, names US memory vendor Micron as the number two DRAM supplier, with a marketshare of 17.6 per cent. That leaves Samsung not far behind, at 16.8 per cent of the whole. At least that's what IDC says -- Samsung reckons the figure is closer to 22 per cent, according to company boss Y W Lee, cited by Electronics Buyer's News. It argues that since its yields are better than those of Hyundai, even if its rival is punching out more parts, it is still making the most money out of the two. And, in any case, the company blustered, we're focusing our efforts on 128Mb chips, not low-end 64Mb parts. So yar boo sucks to you, IDC. Hyundai cited its increased capacity as the basis for its ranking in the IDC chart. Company execs also pointed to its decision to chase the DDR SDRAM business while Samsung has focused on Rambus. They expect DDR to be everywhere in 2000, while Rambus will be relegated to high-end PCs. Except that Rambus memory will also be sported by Sony's PlayStation 2, and that's likely to sell in such huge quantities that Rambus should end up with a little bigger share of the overall memory market than Hyundai's smug spokesfolks would have us believe -- they put its share as no more than five per cent, rising to eight per cent in 2001. ®