Spot Market for Memory Remains Stable This Week, but Demand Continues to Be Sluggish

Following two consecutive quarters of significant increases in contract prices from original manufacturers, their financial performance and stock prices have repeatedly hit historical highs. The market capitalizations of Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have all surpassed the $1 trillion mark, with Samsung even entering the top ten globally. In the second half of this year, driven absolutely by AI computing power demands, the core momentum behind memory price hikes remains strong. Furthermore, as OEMs anchor themselves by signing long-term supply agreements with key customers for the coming years, profit visibility has greatly increased, pushing operating profits to new heights. However, due to soaring memory costs, higher pricing for end products, and intensified brand competition, demand for applications such as smartphones and PCs is inevitably expected to further weaken in the second half of the year. Conversely, the server market enjoys strong rigid support. Consequently, memory prices will retain some upward momentum; smartphone and PC memory prices will follow suit passively, albeit with narrowing quarterly increases, presenting an overall trend of shrinking volume but rising prices.

Turning to the spot market, current market heat is primarily concentrated in specific capacities of server RDIMMs and eSSDs. Benefiting from North American clients' willingness to accept higher premiums, prices for these products have risen rapidly since mid-to-late May, alongside significant increases in trading prices for certain high-grade D4/D5 particles. Meanwhile, although the price inversion between Q2 NAND resource trading prices and OEM spot official prices has intensified—continuously testing the price tolerance of memory vendors—OEMs remain firm in tightening supply to maintain slight price increases. Additionally, mainstream QLC NAND has seen no normal supply for several months this year, leading to a tight supply of enterprise SSDs. Only recently has a small amount of this resource become available, but at exorbitant prices, further driving up production costs for newly procured enterprise SSDs.

On the upstream resource front, Flash Wafer and DRAM resource prices remain unchanged.

Capitalizing on the "618" shopping festival, some brands have discounted consumer SSDs for online retail promotions, with certain 1TB models dropping below 800 RMB. Offline channel brand SSDs have experienced continuous, gradual declines over the past few weeks without showing signs of stabilizing, further exacerbating the price inversion in channel spot markets. Currently, market focus is centered on major industry exhibitions held recently, with stakeholders hoping that technological and product innovations from major manufacturers will stimulate a turnaround in the market. This week, prices for channel SSDs and memory modules have remained temporarily stable.

In the enterprise market, some memory vendors recently attempted to quote low single-digit percentage increases for DDR5 SODIMM. However, with the average selling price (ASP) of DDR5 generally exceeding $1.7/Gb and already accumulating a certain premium, PC OEMs have very limited price acceptance, requiring more time for customer demand to align. For enterprise SSDs, facing steadily increasing monthly NAND resource prices from OEMs, the primary pressure stems from rising costs. This week, prices for both enterprise SSDs and DDR SODIMM have remained basically flat.

Currently, as it is the beginning of the month, market demand remains sluggish, and memory vendors continue to adopt a stable pricing strategy. Additionally, while individual AI PC terminals have signaled demand for large-capacity LP5X products like 16GB, excessively high trading prices have created a gap in price expectations between buyers and sellers, making actual transactions quite difficult.