Svmuu News: Apple is lobbying the U.S. government Donald Trump to obtain approval to purchase memory chips from the Chinese chipmaker Changxin Memory Technologies. Due to a combination of factors driving up memory prices, Apple took the rare step of raising the prices of its MacBook and iPad models this Thursday, causing its market capitalization to plummet by $263 billion.Apple hopes to alleviate the financial pressure on its suppliers by adding Changxin Memory to its list of memory suppliers.
Changxin Memory and Yangtze Memory Technologies have already been placed on the U.S. Department of Defense’s blacklist of Chinese military enterprises (the 1260H list).The U.S. Department of Commerce had planned to add Changxin Memory to the Entity List last year, but the White House postponed the plan because trade negotiations with China were underway at the time. Currently, aside from Chinese companies, the global memory chip industry is primarily monopolized by three firms: U.S.-basedMicron, South Korea’s Samsung, and SK Hynix. (FT)