SEOUL, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won has said the global semiconductor industry appears to have hit bottom, but the recovery of chip prices is still sluggish.
"The semiconductor industry itself is no longer at rock bottom," Chey, who serves as head of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told reporters on Monday. SK Group has SK hynix Inc., the world's second-biggest maker of memory chips, under its wing.
Chey expected prices for dynamic random access memory chips to be on a recovery footing, but painted a bleak picture for prices of NAND flash memory chips.
"DRAM is getting better, but NAND is still at an almost sleep-like level," Chey said.
In October, SK hynix posted losses for the fourth consecutive quarter in the third quarter of this year, but recovering demand for high-performance products helped narrow its operating deficit.
SK hynix said its operating losses amounted to 1.79 trillion won (US$1.32 billion) for the July-September period on a consolidated basis, compared with a profit of 1.67 trillion won a year ago.
Source: Yonhap News Agency