According to Witsview, a division of TrendForce, despite the relaxation of the US-China trade dispute in the wake of G20, demand for various end products in 2H will remain in a conservative mood until the situation becomes clear through subsequent negotiations, leading to a less-than-expected restocking demand for panels. Suppliers are already finding trouble profiting in 2Q due to continuously sliding panel prices. If the US-China negotiations hit a wall again, the continued trade conflict may drag down sales in the peak seasons of 2H. This may drastically raise the chances of panel prices crashing below cash costs and pressure businesses for the second half-year, forcing them to decide whether to reduce production.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, says that Tsinghua Unigroup’s official statement on June 30th has revealed its newly composed DRAM group, with Diao Shijing, former director of the Electronic Information Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as the group’s Chairman and Charles Kao as CEO. This forms a new milestone for China on the road to developmental independency of DRAM products after the US put JHICC on the Entity List.
Toshiba Memory Corp. (TMC) reported that its main NAND Flash production base in Yokkaichi, Japan, experienced a 13-minute power outage on June 15. All production facilities within the base (Fab 2, Fab 3, Fab 4, Fab 5, and Fab 6) were affected by the power outage, but we have yet to see all facilities return to normal operation as of now. An assessment by DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , gives that wafer quotes will be pressured to rise in the short term due to this event, and there may be a rise in 2D NAND flash product prices and a slight shrink in price decline for 3D NAND flash products in the third quarter.
TrendForce has released its 1Q19 rankings for the top ten IC design companies worldwide by revenue, which showed only MediaTek maintaining a small growth among the top five as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD all showed declines. Nvidia declined the most by 24.4% YoY due to unfinished destocking.
According to the latest investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, demand for smartphones and servers go below expected levels in 2019 as the US-China trade dispute heats up. Adding the CPU shortage, which continues to haunt notebook shipments, we may see the shipments of eMMC/UFSs, SSDs etc. fail to meet expectations for peak season 3Q, and cause contract prices to fall uncontrollably.