The current memory market is in a phase of stark contrast. Driven still by the dominant logic of AI, contract prices for server NAND and DRAM from original manufacturers — despite the high base from a violent doubling surge last quarter — continue to maintain significant room for price increases in Q2. The PC market, in order to secure supply support, is absorbing even higher price hikes, with contract prices increasingly converging toward those of the server market. Meanwhile, the mobile phone market is experiencing some divergence in original manufacturers' supply and pricing strategies due to certain non-market factors, though mobile memory prices generally remain on an upward trend.
Notably, the memory spot market is also showing structural divergence. Official resource prices for NAND from original manufacturers remain firm, with some resources seeing tightened supply this month. Embedded memory and industrial SSDs, which are more closely tied to resource costs, continue to face high costs, leaving final product prices steady. Since the supply-demand reversal in the memory market last Q4, some PC OEMs have failed to reach deep strategic partnerships with original manufacturers in time, resulting in weaker bargaining power for supply. As a result, they are incorporating more domestic memory manufacturers into their supply chains to ensure stability. Some industrial memory players are capturing this demand by leveraging their brand and product advantages. With original manufacturers firmly raising PC memory prices to around 0.30/GB in Q2,and resource prices already breaking through 0.20/GB across the board by March, industrial players face rising cost pressure. Moreover, original manufacturers are shipping mostly high-capacity SSDs to PC OEMs, giving industrial players considerable pricing power in 256GB and lower-capacity SSDs. This week, prices for industrial 256GB SATA/PCIe 3.0 SSDs rose by single-digit percentages.
In contrast, in the channel market, despite news last week that certain original manufacturers and memory brands raised official retail pricing for SSDs, the trade side reacted quickly — with related SSDs and even UDIMMs showing signs of a rebound, and a few traders attempting to build inventory. However, the price expectations of buyers and sellers remain misaligned, resulting in weak buying support. Recently, trade prices for some branded SSDs in the channel have fallen again. With the May Day holiday approaching, channel customers are mostly taking a wait-and-see approach and digesting inventory. Meanwhile, low-end channel resource prices for both NAND and DRAM have yet to stabilize — DRAM low-end resources in particular have fallen as much as 60% in the past month. Under these factors, channel SSD and UDIMM prices have fallen further this week. Additionally, due to aggressive pricing by some industrial players, other manufacturers have followed suit by revising down DDR4 UDIMM prices in response to peer price cuts.
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