With major NAND flash chip producers allocating more supplies for Apple, Taiwan-based memory module houses have seen a serious shortage of the memory chips, according to industry sources.
Samsung Electronics has informed Taiwan module makers that it will halve its NAND flash supply to them in September, and Micron Technology has also told some of its downstream customers that no NAND flash chips are available, claimed the sources. Toshiba and Hynix Semiconductor are also giving priority to Apple, and are offering limited supply to the spot market, the sources added.
Apple is expected to officially launch the iPhone in China in the fourth quarter of 2009. The vendor is also now selling its new iPod Touch media player featuring capacity up to 64GB.
The average spot price of 16Gb multi-level cell (MLC) chips rose 0.85% to close at US$5.17 on September 11, and the 32Gb part was up 0.5% to US$7.13, according to DRAMeXchange. In the contract market, average pricing for 16Gb chips climbed 7.2% to US$4.48 in the first half of September, and 32Gb went up 4.3% to US$6.80.
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