For a year, wholesale prices for DRAM-type memory have grown by a dozen percent a month. Since autumn, the wholesale value of NAND chips has grown. In each of these cases, the demand for smartphones is partly to blame. Memory LPDDR3 and LPDDR4 are of interest to memory manufacturers more than some DDR4 memory for PCs, and NAND flash, alas, is needed not only for SSD, but also for storage systems with smartphones. And the popularity of video and images in high definition quickly eat up the capacity of built-in flash memory provided by manufacturers. In the course are memory cards and pull the demand for chips.
Recently, the Japanese unit of the well-known Taiwanese company Transcend Information reported that it is barely able to satisfy only half of the orders placed on the memory chips. This predictably leads to an increase in purchasing prices for products. Some lulliness in the smartphone market in the first half of this year is replaced in July by the growing activity of manufacturers. This is especially evident in Chinese manufacturers, including such actively growing newcomers as Vivo and Oppo Electronics. The invasion of similar manufacturers on the Indian market creates an additional burden on the memory market, and the beginning of preparation for the autumn-winter sales will only aggravate the situation with a memory deficit.
According to Transcend Information, in July in the wholesale market of 64-Gbit NAND TLC chips cost $ 3.50, which is 13% higher than June's prices. The DDR3 memory chips with a capacity of 4 Gb per month went up by 3% - up to $ 3.10 per chip. This imbalance in the increase in the cost of memory chips forces manufacturers to give priority to the production of memory for smartphones, reducing the share of products for the PC and, in fact, pushing the price of memory for computers higher and higher.
Nintendo, which promised to increase the production of the game consoles Switch in July and August, can suffer from a memory deficit. The RAM system of the Switch relies on mobile DRAM, similar to that installed in smartphones. The latter's deficit risks negating Nintendo's efforts to throw out additional lots of interesting consoles to the market. But we still have a jubilee iPhone! This product promises to include a lot of new, including increased capacity of memory systems. In general, there is nothing to rejoice.