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amlutolast Sunday at 1:28 AM3 repliesview on HN

Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?

Or the supply of non-CXMT DRAM is sufficient poor right now that Chinese buyers, of which there are plenty, are willing to pay approximately as much for CXMT’s product as for anyone else’s?

CXMT’s real ability to reduce prices will come (if it does) by adding enough supply to drive down prices everywhere, or at least everywhere that is willing to import CXMT’s products without absurd tariffs.


Replies

heavyset_golast Sunday at 4:24 AM

If they have the runway, they can try the tried and true method of undercutting competitors until they fold, and then capture the market for themselves.

Investors have the stomach for this tactic, surely a company with the state's backing can remain solvent even longer than those funded by private investors.

walterbelllast Sunday at 1:40 AM

That depends on whether your investor (China) also sells integrated products whose sales would increase if RAM were cheaper, e.g. smartphones or mini PCs with bundled LPDDR5, https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/your-laptop-is-abou...

  Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators. This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly.
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dworkslast Sunday at 1:43 AM

Why would I buy CXMT if it's virtually the same price as Hynix?

Edit: I see you made an edit without noting that you did so.

Only this sentence was in the pre-edit comment: "Or maybe CXMT is not dumb? If the worldwide price of some commodity is $100 and you can produce an item that is nearly as good as everyone else’s, would you sell it for $98 or for $50?"

For your added comments: There is no supply issue, there are hundreds of sellers of Hynix, Crucial, Samsung ddr5 on Taobao. For your second comment about them driving down prices later on by increasing supply, well, I first of all noted that perhaps capacity is not great in my comment, and you are also contradicting your first point where you said CXMT would be stupid to compete on price.

In reality, the history of every Chinese market entrant, even those leading technologically, shows that they always cut margins to compete by driving down costs. I have a decade worth of experience related to this.

I believe CXMT simply has not gotten to the stage where they really try to win market share and crank up supply - perhaps due to lack of capital, or as I said, due to capacity limitations (which may be a result of capital).

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