The market researcher attributed the solid growth in the DRAM market to "peak season demand and surging prices for DRAM products across different applications."

Avril Wu, research director of DRAMeXchange, said, "Rising demand for mobile DRAM kept squeezing the industry's production capacity for PC DRAM.""Contract prices of PC DRAM modules increased by more than 30 percent sequentially on average in the fourth quarter due to an insufficient market supply," Wu said.

Samsung Electronics Co., SK hynix Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. accounted for 93.6 percent of the global DRAM market for the fourth quarter.

In terms of revenues, Samsung's share of the DRAM market fell to 47.5 percent during the fourth quarter, from 50.2 percent a quarter earlier.

SK hynix saw its share rise to 27.3 percent for the fourth quarter from 26.7 percent a quarter earlier.

DRAMeXchange expected the prices of DRAM chips to remain strong in the coming months.

"Looking ahead, memory content for various devices will continue to increase. Also, the current capacity expansion efforts undertaken by suppliers will not start to affect the market until the second half of 2017," it said.

"In the meantime, the general undersupply problem will worsen, and contract prices of PC DRAM modules in this first quarter may see an even larger sequential increase of nearly 40 percent on average. Rising prices are expected for the second quarter as well."  (Yonhap)