The Ministry of International Trade and Industry is given to making forecasts of output of various types of commodity chip but its forecasts are in reality more in the nature of mandates: on memory chips, the word from on high is that production of 256K memories will start to fall off in the second quarter of this year, while output of 1M parts is set to soar; it wants production of 256Ks to go up just 0.4% in the first quarter, and to fall by 2.6% to 159.9m parts in the second quarter; it looks for 1M output to rise 46% to 30.8m parts in the first quarter, and 41% more to 43.5m in the second quarter.