“Apple Inc will struggle to cut its reliance on rival Samsung Electronics for component supplies, analysts and industry sources said on Thursday, despite speculation that it has begun reducing its use of Samsung memory chips,” Miyoung Kim reports for Reuters.
“Samsung has lost 6 percent of its value, or $11 billion, since a Taiwanese trade news outlet reported on Wednesday that Apple had placed big new orders with Japanese chipmaker Elpida for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips,” Kim reports. “The report has stoked concerns among Samsung investors that Apple wants to help turn the struggling Elpida, now in bankruptcy protection, into a much bigger supplier to the U.S. tech giant, partly at the expense of South Korea’s Samsung.”
Kim reports, “U.S.-based Micron Technology Corp is in talks to acquire Elpida’s business as the Japanese firm tries to restructure after tough market conditions and global competition drove it into bankruptcy protection… ‘No company wants to have just one supplier. Just on that basis I think they’re probably just shifting the (DRAM) balance, looking for equilibrium between two or three suppliers,’ said Monika Garg, an analyst at Pacific Crest”
“A major shift away from Samsung could also be complicated and costly for Apple, analysts said, adding that Samsung currently supplied Apple with high-end DRAM chips which were faster and more power-efficient than Elpida’s main chips,” Kim reports. “Samsung and fellow South Korean chipmaker SK hynix, whose shares were also hit on Wednesday by the Apple-Elpida news, make chips with transistors that are 20 to 30 nanometers apart, giving them superior performance to Elpida’s 40-nanometer class, according to analysts.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As if Apple isn’t known for taking complicated things and making them simple or isn’t sitting on a $100+ billion mountain of cash.
You know what seems really costly for Apple? Samsung stealing their iPhone designs and mimicking their OS to the tune of 86.6 million units, or 2.6 times more units than Apple moved in the first quarter of this year alone.*
What’s actually quite complicated about this situation is that Apple has for years been helping and continue to help Samsung to finance the theft.
Continuing to pump billions into Samsung’s coffers each and every quarter while suing them to no great effect makes us wonder WTF is really going on here. Maybe Apple actually wants Android around to help kill off Microsoft et al. and all of the court cases and biography quotes are just hot air? Or perhaps Apple is just continuing their grand, decades-long tradition of hiring lawyers who suck and can’t manage to prevent the copycats of world from blatantly stealing and capitalizing royally on Apple’s innovations?
*We know that Apple rules in profit share, for now. We also know that losing 85+ million people per quarter (that’s over a third of a billion per year!) and seeing them fall into a much more difficult to acquire category than if you’d simply acquired them with their first smartphone could prove rather costly in the long run.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s and all the while Apple keeps doing billions of dollars worth of business with Samsung:
Related article:
Samsung value drops $10 billion over fears of being cut out of Apple supply chain – May 16, 2012