> Neither party apparently knew he was negotiating with the other.

I don’t buy it that two of the largest manufacturers of DRAM in the world, from the same country, didn’t know this. Even of you ignore each company’s intelligence teams, that’s also the job of the country’s internal intelligence services, to make sure they know what all companies are doing and then make it so they have the best leverage to gain as much as possible. Both companies would have known “somehow” and played hardball.