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Samsung Electronics plans to build a new semiconductor plant in South Korea at a cost of Won15.6tn ($14.7bn) to meet burgeoning demand for chips used in mobile devices. Construction of the chip-making plant, which will be the largest of its kind globally, will begin in the first half of 2015 and be completed in the second half of 2017, Samsung said.
While the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has created a global consumer frenzy, eager Apple fans are still anticipating the release of the upgraded 2GB storage iPad Air 2, and Macbook Pro, which will be equipped with LPDDR3 DRAM for the first time.
Construction of Samsung and SK Hynix's new fabrication plants will be finished in 2015, and next year's plans for manufacturing capacity are currently being changed, according to DRAMeXchange, a division of Taiwan-based market intelligence firm TrendForce. The significant increase in capacity at Samsung's Line17 fab initially scheduled for the second quarter of 2015 was delayed. Production will begin at 10K wafer starts per month in 2Q15 and increase gradually, reaching 40K wafer starts per month by the end of the year.
An increasing number of DRAM manufacturers are planning to expand their capacity in the fourth quarter of 2014 as DRAM market supply tightens, while bit supply could grow by nearly 30% next year following recent decreases in die size and adjustments of capacity. As a result, the industry’s oligolopy structure could face considerable challenges in 2015, among them oversupply that would eat into producers’ profit margins, said Avril Wu, assistant vice president of DRAMeXchange, a memory and storage research division of TrendForce.
As demand for tablets and smartphones is increasing, SSD demand for use in notebooks, servers and data centers is following in suit. Additionally, as the Internet of Things (IoT) is starting to further implement NAND Flash, the market for NAND Flash is expected to rise 9% in 2015 to US$26.6 billion, according to DRAMeXchange, a subsidiary of market intelligence firm TrendForce.
