Elpida wants to increase capacity *and* market prices: wishful thinking ahoy!

[Arun]

This headline at Digitimes made my day: Elpida aims to be number-one DRAM maker in 2010; calls for resumption of healthy pricing

But don't worry, it gets better:

[...] the entire group currently delivers a monthly capacity of 270,000 wafers [...] Rexchip will boost its capacity to 300,000 wafers in 2010, with total capacity from the four fabs of Rexchip, three of PSC and two of Elpida targeted to reach 600,000 wafers. [...] By encouraging a reasonable pricing environment, DRAM makers and PC OEMs will see mutual benefits, Sakamoto commented. If industry players resume a logical pricing mechanism, he anticipates that fellow DRAM makers should break even in the second quarter at the earliest, and pricing for 1Gb DDR2 chips is likely to rebound to US$3.50-4.00 levels by year-end 2008.

Gosh. These guys are going to crash so hard it's not even funny. They are going to deliver totally crazy bit growth in a market that, quite simply, doesn't need it. And they basically just hope that OEMs will let them increase prices so that everyone in the DRAM industry can make a lot of money and survive, because otherwise they risk suffering from monopolistic pricing. Yeah right, like any OEM is seriously going to look at it that way.

This headline and the news piece's text represent perfectly why I believe the DRAM market is doomed. And by extension, the NAND market is doomed too unless they can get cost/MByte to be low enough to replace HDDs in even low-end PCs. It's really frightening to see some of these DRAM companies (Elpida is not the only one) suffering from such massive wishful thinking and bad strategic planning.