With the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays approaching, some memory industry players have already entered vacation mode, leading to a noticeable decline in market activity this week. Many manufacturers believe that even active price reductions would struggle to stimulate demand, so most have chosen to hold current prices steady. The limited success of modest price concessions by a few firms under performance pressure—evidenced by continued shrinking transaction volumes—further confirms the weak market conditions.
Although there was a sudden wave of inquiries for certain 1Tb TLC wafers last week, causing a slight uptick in trading prices, the momentum proved unsustainable. Most other wafers continue to edge lower, with some traders attempting to offload previously stockpiled inventory at below-market quotes to lock in profits, keeping the wafer trading market in a phase of bottom-testing. Over a longer horizon, trading prices for some wafers have already fallen back to levels seen in January this year.
In contrast, over the past six months, while NAND wafer price adjustments by original manufacturers have not been entirely synchronized, the trend of stable or slightly rising official prices has persisted since the March peak in trading prices. Some wafer prices have even hit new highs, widening the gap between official manufacturer prices and spot market trading prices. Manufacturers are expected to continue stabilizing prices through supply control, while the trading market will likely keep aligning with these official pricing strategies. Supported by manufacturers’ price floors, a sharp plunge in wafer spot prices is unlikely in the near term. However, any loosening of official prices could trigger panic selling and accelerate inventory clearance in the spot market.
On the finished product side, demand for memory spot market goods has weakened since Q2. Industry SSDs and embedded eMMC prices have turned downward since Q3. The situation is further aggravated by continuous supply chain sell-offs, driving down trading prices for branded finished products. A severe inversion has emerged between manufacturers’ official shipment prices to clients and spot market trading prices, with low-end solutions particularly disruptive due to their lower market prices. Despite mounting cost pressures on memory manufacturers, modest price cuts by some firms at quarter-end to boost performance have failed to generate strong sales, as the prevailing “buy on the rise, not on the fall” sentiment keeps actual transactions sluggish. Channel and industry DDR5 modules, as well as embedded LPDDR products, are also facing cost pressures from rising resource prices. Current high prices have nearly reached the upper limit of customer affordability, making it increasingly difficult to pass on further production cost increases to finished products if resource prices continue to climb.
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