Historically, the third and fourth quarters are traditional peak seasons. However, over the past several consecutive quarters, memory chip prices have surged by nearly fourfold. Since the beginning of this year, the pressure of rising memory hardware costs has been continuously passed on to product prices across smartphones, PCs, smart cameras, gaming consoles, TVs, and smart glasses. Nevertheless, the target consumer base for electronics is highly price-sensitive. Terminal manufacturers can only raise prices in batches, and the pace of price adjustments for related products is far slower than the rate of memory chip price increases. Recently, Xiaomi raised the prices of multiple models on sale for the second time this year, and Acer has publicly predicted that PC products will still have a price increase margin of about 5% in Q3. In the second half of the year, as the unit prices of PCs and smartphones continue to climb, the suppressing effect on consumer purchasing power will become even more pronounced.
Although since the second quarter of this year, some downstream memory manufacturers have shown weakening enthusiasm for stocking due to rising inventory levels and a lack of actual demand, their acceptance of higher-priced wafers has been particularly low. However, before memory original manufacturers transition away from their dominant position as sellers in the market, they can dynamically adjust the allocation of mainstream resources across different application markets. They continue to ignore the spot wafer price inversion and maintain a firm stance on price stabilization. For memory manufacturers, the stagnation of wafer price increases and the fact that the increase in original manufacturers' contract prices is lower than market expectations are continuously disturbing and intensifying the emotional game between buyers and sellers. More severely, low-end resources that were previously common in channel SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives have recently begun to penetrate the embedded eMMC market. As we get closer to the mid-to-late third quarter, memory manufacturers will face increasing pressure on shipments and financial performance.
Today, Flash wafer prices remained flat, while prices for some DDR chips were adjusted upward. Specifically, DDR4 8Gb 3200 and DDR5 16Gb Major/24Gb Major were raised to $22.00, $40.00, and $48.00, respectively. High-grade DDR chips from original manufacturers are only supplied in small quantities to individual strategic partner memory manufacturers. Under tight resource conditions, it remains a pure seller's market.
Furthermore, due to the excessively high unit price of these chips, they are no longer suitable for consumer products such as PCs; instead, they are mainly used for producing server RDIMMs and as cache solutions for enterprise-grade eSSDs.
Since the second quarter of this year, the trading market has accumulated a massive volume of 64GB eMMC products, including those from both original manufacturers and various memory brand manufacturers. Without actual demand to absorb them, these eMMC products can only circulate back and forth among traders, making effective digestion impossible. Currently, memory manufacturers mostly adopt a case-by-case negotiation approach to facilitate transactions, with actual transaction prices continuing to decline, leading to a slight price drop for 64GB eMMC products this week. As some original manufacturers put the discontinuation plan for 512Gb TLC NAND on the agenda, the price gap between 64GB eMMC and 32GB or lower-capacity eMMC products is gradually narrowing, which is expected to further stimulate customers' interest in upgrading to 64GB eMMC solutions.
Last week, regulatory efforts in the channel gradually strengthened, but this has not yet had a substantial impact on the market. Due to the continued inversion between resources and finished products, channel SSDs still face persistently high costs. As a result, channel manufacturers are mainly focusing on price stabilization without engaging in drastic price cuts. This week, prices for channel SSDs and UDIMM remained basically stable.
After nearly two months of price increases, the price gap between domestic and overseas memory original manufacturers' secondary DDR5 chips has narrowed significantly. However, a gap of over 10% still remains, meaning memory module solutions utilizing domestic chips still retain a price advantage. Additionally, mainland PC customers are generally more price-sensitive. Under the current situation where no price inversion has yet formed between secondary chips and finished products, memory manufacturers can only squeeze their profit margins in the short term to maintain current prices.
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