Samsung Slows Memory Chip Production to Keep Prices Stable

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Samsung has a long history of being accused of (and found guilty of) price fixing.
So It should come as no surprise that their future plans for price fixing involves "a lot more price fixing".
 
Here is a company the President needs to go after with a tariff, instead the poor Walmart shoppers will see prices going up on almost everything they buy as all of it most is imported from China.
 
Anyone else looking forward to China catching up in the memory fab business? With moves like this I'll probably be much more willing to spend my money on Chinese made RAM over Samsung in the future.
 


You mean the same Walmart that shed it's founder's philosophies and encouraged* companies to move production overseas to China? Note, while Walmart was able to get products sold to them cheaper, their "lower" prices were not significant, or when they were, were designed to damage competitors' sales.



*encouraged as in proposed it as a way to spike the company's profits AND sell cheaper to Walmart, or in lieu of that, sell said company for a hefty sum to some other company that would do it.
 

Do you not see the irony of applying a tariff on a product for being overpriced?

And these memory chips surely find their way into some Walmart products.

Tariffs are not a magic bullet. They're only really useful in a few, specific cases. Even then, they should be used with care to avoid sparking trade wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act#After_enactment

At first, the tariff seemed to be a success. According to historian Robert Sobel, "Factory payrolls, construction contracts, and industrial production all increased sharply." However, larger economic problems loomed in the guise of weak banks. When the Creditanstalt of Austria failed in 1931, the global deficiencies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff became apparent.

US imports decreased 66% from $4.4 billion (1929) to $1.5 billion (1933), and exports decreased 61% from $5.4 billion to $2.1 billion. GNP fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $75.8 billion in 1931 and bottomed out at $55.6 billion in 1933. Imports from Europe decreased from a 1929 high of $1.3 billion to just $390 million during 1932, while US exports to Europe decreased from $2.3 billion in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade decreased by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.
Click to expand...
 

You mean so they can withhold shipments of semiconductors, like they did with rare earth metals, a few years ago? Yes, that's a sword I'd very much like dangling over my head.
 
greedy greedy they gotta get that money but I'm gonna laugh when they are in the same situation intel is in not being able to keep up when demand suddenly the sky rockets
 
We have the oil producers using this practice for years, and we all accept this. Why should it be different with memory chips?
 
In 2015 newegg's 2x 8GB DIMM DDR3L-1600 @ $73.99 + free shipping and 2x 8GB DIMM DDR3-1600 @ $62.99 + free shipping. I paid a really high price for my fast 1833 DDR3 16GB kit G.Skills $79.99 back then. Now granted back in 2016 DDR4 was super new at 2x 8GB DIMM DDR4-2133 @ $114.99 + free shipping so Samsung has it completely backward to stabilize prices. The 16GB kits should stabilize around $75 and the DDR4 32GB kits should be entering the under $200 category. Its getting clear that Samsung needs sued for price fixing and more than a slap on the wrist. In 2015 the $/Mbyte (Y) average was 0.0045 and in 2017 the lowest is 0.0064. It should be totally turned around given Moore's law so what gives?
 
They are already doing this in collusion with Hynix and Micron, and are currently being under investigation/sued for this. This is them just making it public knowledge under the pretense this is totally true and not a made up lie.
 
Love Tom's Hardware BUT please stop putting those videos in the middle of articles,they are a pain in the ass if you think people are watching your wrong, it only pisses me off scrolling past it.
 
Agreed. A tariff in this case would be counter-productive. There are times when you need to slap tariffs on those who were already trading in bad faith - for example certain abusive trade partners that use local (often state-run) industry to ruin your domestic production, with the goal of cornering the market, all while taxing the everliving piss out of those same categories of imported goods in THEIR market.

But yes, it needs to be done with the goal of leveling the playing field, rather than pure protectionism. Sometimes though, you've waited until it's almost too late and your hand is weak... things that should have been done a decade or two ago can be a lot harder to pull off today.
 

Occasionally it sounds like a good idea for a brief time. In the short term it would be nice to rub Samsung's nose in it. But guess what? In the long term, the Chinese are going to be worse.
 
Call me crazy but I can't say I trust Chinese government backed memory modules not to come with extra, undocumented features built in. It would be reasonably trivial to include the ability to data mine or otherwise cause unwanted side effects under certain conditions with these things, which is a bit concerning. Intel's Management Engine comes to mind. What cheaper and easier component than the system memory could a government come up with for mass cyber espionage?

 

Yes, that's pretty crazy.

But, what they could do is "dump" at below-market prices to drive out foreign competition. Then, price their memory chips much higher, unless you use one of their CPUs or SoCs. And that could have plenty of backdoors.
 
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