The third quarter is already past its halfway mark, yet the traditional peak season for consumer electronics is showing signs of "a peak season that isn't peaking." This is largely because, following the earlier round of memory price increases, demand-side players had already engaged in nearly half a year of aggressive stockpiling. Since Q2, various end-application terminals have begun hitting the brakes on procurement, and the Q3 market in particular has been notably sluggish — with reports of goods being dumped, orders being returned, and deliveries being delayed surfacing from time to time.
Faced with high inventory and weak demand, as September unfolds, memory vendors will focus on pushing shipments to meet performance targets. Although memory vendors are doing their utmost to stabilize prices, the urgency to ship clearly takes precedence. Meanwhile, end customers are gradually lowering their price expectations. With a significant gap between buyer and seller price expectations, a prolonged period of negotiation lies ahead. Even more concerning, some memory vendors, under financial pressure, have already begun aggressively cutting prices on channel SSDs and UDIMM since last month in an effort to stimulate demand and accelerate shipments. Over the next month, memory vendors will seize this window to ramp up shipments, and prices for memory products — particularly in the trading segment where inventory is abundant and peer competition is fierce — will come under pressure.
On the upstream resource side, Flash Wafer and DDR chip prices remained unchanged this week.
At the end of last month, some channel vendors, facing excessive performance pressure, had no choice but to trade price for volume. However, such low prices came at the expense of profit margins, and without low-cost inventory as a buffer, some vendors could even face losses. As a result, most channel vendors did not passively follow the price cuts. This week, prices for channel SSDs, DDR4, and DDR5 UDIMMs remained stable.
Driven by rising DDR5 resource costs, prices for industry-grade 16GB DDR5 SODIMM saw consecutive modest increases in July and August. Although industry memory vendors are still attempting to push further price hikes for non-mainland China customers, some Taiwanese PC clients are already finding it difficult to accept higher prices. Industry memory vendors are now seeking new orders from other overseas customers, but orders closed at the new pricing remain very scarce.
Recently, supply chain sources have reported that starting September 1, multiple smartphone manufacturers have launched a new round of price increases on their existing models, with price hikes of approximately RMB 200, 500, and 1,000 for low-end, mid-range, and high-end models, respectively. This will further dampen actual smartphone shipments and may slow down the procurement pace of Tier 1 smartphone customers. For embedded memory products, which are already suffering from sluggish demand and intense competition from low-end solutions, this is truly adding insult to injury.
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