The memory chip shortage will persist for another three years, a Toshiba Corp executive told the Montgomery Securities Investment Conference in San Francisco conference this week. Most observers had been confident that supply would come into line with demand by the middle of next year at the latest, so the view from Toshiba is a big blow. Now we have a big gap, warned Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, executive vice-president for electronic components at Toshiba, and next year we will have the same gap or it will increase. He said that the 25% growth in demand for memory from the computer industry in 1988 was likely to be repeated in 1989. Other factors were the greatly increased demand for memory on new computers – Amstrad’s current MS-DOS machines come with 640Kb, the 80386 model coming in January will have a minimum 4Mb – and reluctance of chipmakers to invest enormous sums to expand capacity for a demand that might be fairly shortlived. The continuing shortage has to be good news for the one dedicated US manufacturer, Micron Technology Inc, the Boise, Idaho company that was regarded as absurdly quixotic only a year ago for carrying on specialising in memory chips when all the other US manufacturers bar Texas Instruments, which makes them in Japan anyway, had pulled out. Micron’s dogged determination is vindicated by the company’s fiscal year-end figures – Company Results, alongside, and the company has improved its manufacturing technology to get more chips out of its plants.
NMB Technologies Inc, Chatsworth, California, reports that its parent, bearings manufacturer Minebea Co, is doing its bit to meet the overwhelming demand for memory chips. It says that production schedules for high performance 256K-bit memory chips will peak at an all-time high early in 1989 and that the company will continue at full production capacity throughout the year. It has also decided to dedicate one of the factories originally intended for production of 1M-bit parts to the manufacture of 256K ones instead.
