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DRAM And NAND Chip Makers Are Determined To Drive Up DDR5 And SSD Prices
(hothardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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I have information directly from the three main manufacturers. Demand is down, production is down, so in order to not show losses on the balance sheet prices went up.
TSMC did the same thing last year- raised prices by around 27% for all customers. Because demand is way, WAY down. Sadly their increase wasn't enough to stave off a drop in revenue.
When you have the whole market cornered, normal supply and demand economics don't apply.
Do they have a captive audience for those who still have a demand? I can understand "look, if we have to keep the production lines going to provide you with required hardware, of which we are not selling as much as we used to, we have to raise prices" - but if the customers who still buy are flexible, this would only mean even less people buy.
Customers are fairly inflexible. If you need storage or ram for 10k new servers, that's it. You have to have it. And since all manufacturers raised prices, you're going to spend more. Making matters worse, if you have to onboard another vendor to safe a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands on time and resources to go through a qualification cycle alone.
Home computers make up a significantly smaller portion of the computer component space. So while this might prevent a person from upgrading their SSD or building a DDR 5 equipped gaming computer, that's small percentages of sales. A single corporate relationship account will buy thousands of devices at a time, larger accounts will buy tens of hundreds of thousands. A cloud operator building 10k servers with 12 channels of RAM will buy 24 dimms per server. It's a totally different game.
In principal I would say "fair enough", except that for cloud operators, the service prices would also probably increase, possibly leading to less end user demand for cloud space. Anyways, your point is well constructed, I concede ;) Although the logic "less customers, therefore let's raise prices" would drive a lot of vendors into bankrupcy.