Jim Elliott, VP of Memory Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor must have a pretty tough job. He spoke at last week’s MemCon 09 and his talk was titled “Memory: What it Takes to Turn the Corner.” I knew the memory vendors had it tough, but didn’t realize how tough until Elliott rolled out this slide:

The slide shows that the spot price for Gbit DDR2 memory chips dropped 95% from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2008. Wow! That’s 95% in two years. What kind of business could survive that sort of price erosion?