Recently, storage chip manufacturers have been insisting on raising prices, but module manufacturers have refused to purchase and are unwilling to accept price increases. According to insiders, the demand for enterprise storage and cloud data centers has remained strong, but customers in the consumer market find it difficult to bear the significant price increase.

The industry believes that based on the recent attitude of memory manufacturers continuing to raise prices, the suspension of quotes by Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix may become a price increase signal and affect contract prices in the second quarter.

Since the end of 2023, smartphone manufacturers in Chinese Mainland have begun to replenish inventory, and PC OEMs are also replenishing inventory. Due to customers still cautiously observing market sentiment in the first half of the year, the replenishment momentum in the second quarter has weakened, as it is expected that the sales volume of smartphones and personal computers equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) features will not increase until the second half of the year. But the booming development of AI has also prompted cloud service providers to increase their investment in infrastructure, providing support for the price increase of storage chip suppliers.

Despite the strong demand for enterprise level storage and cloud server applications, the consumer and other application markets have limited acceptance of high growth rates. In this context, some memory module manufacturers have revealed that they do not intend to follow the price increase, but rather choose to temporarily stay on the sidelines to avoid possible order reductions and customer churn risks.

Due to unsatisfactory terminal demand, these module manufacturers are concerned that blindly following price increases may lead to customer loss. In addition, they also noted that if procurement costs cannot be reflected in downstream markets, price increases may affect their own profits and operational conditions. Therefore, these manufacturers have decided not to purchase the originally planned memory products temporarily to observe market trends. This phenomenon indicates that the memory market is facing a certain degree of differentiation, and the price game between upstream original manufacturers and module manufacturers is becoming increasingly fierce.

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