How on earth do you get the price of commodity chips to go up? Answer: Create a fear of shortage.
We all know the story of the Japanese resin plant which was supposed to have burned down meaning there were no plastic packages for DRAM which sent prices soaring a decade or so ago.
Last year we had Samsung's jolly wheeze of announcing a 'power outage' (which subsequently could not be blamed on any power supplier) which was said to have caused a shortage of memories.
Once again, memory prices rose, and even the Samsung share price rose.
Now there's a yarn doing the rounds that Apple has put a 50 million unit order of NAND on Samsung and other customers' orders may be affected.
This is said to be double what Apple ordered in June.
One wonders how many extra won this little tale will add to the Samsung coffers.
Well you can't blame them for trying.