Price Check Q3 2016: DRAM Prices Down Over 20% Since Early 2016
by Anton Shilov on July 25, 2016 12:01 AM ESTSamsung Retains Market Leadership
According to DRAMeXchange, the global DRAM industry earned $8.56 billion revenue in Q1 2016, down from $12.1 billion in Q1 2015 (-29.3%) and from $10.27 billion in the fourth quarter of last year (-16.6%). Analysts have stated that the dropping prices for DRAM ICs and relatively low demand for computer memory as primary reasons for the revenue declines.
With a nearly 30% year-over-year decrease, it is not surprising that all DRAM manufacturers suffered from declining revenue and dropping margins, even though the industry stayed profitable as a whole in the first quarter.
Samsung remained the world’s largest supplier of DRAM in the first quarter with 46.4% of the market (up from 43.1% in Q1 2015), not challenged by its key rivals. Meanwhile, SK Hynix commanded 27.1% of DRAM shipments in the first quarter of 2016, slightly down from the previous quarters. The third largest DRAM maker, Micron, controlled 18.5% of the planet’s DRAM sales in Q1 2016, a significant decrease from 22.5% in the same period a year before.
But Smaller Vendors Pick Up Pace
By contrast, smaller makers like Nanya, Winbond, PowerChip and some other managed to increase their shares slightly in the first quarter of this year. The analysts believe that this happened because they increased their output and could simply supply more DRAM than usual.
Wrapping everything up, it is evident that the transition to DDR4 memory is proceeding rapidly and the industry will produce more DDR4 bits than DDR3 bits later this year. As a result, DDR4 should trend towards being cheaper than DDR3 when the amount of DDR4 will significantly outpace the older technology. It is also noteworthy that Samsung will be able to greatly benefit from its 18 nm fabrication technology in the second half of this year, as its rival Micron is not expected to be ready with its 16 nm manufacturing process before Q4. Thus, Samsung may be able to sell its high-performance and/or low-power DRAM ICs at a premium.
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Minion4Hire - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
JoeyJoJo, just select 180 days instead of 120 on that first chart you link to and you'll see quite clearly that Anandtech's reporting is correct. Compared to the beginning of the year, the current prices are lower. Sure, there have been even lower prices than right now, but prices are still lower than they were 7 months ago.milli - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Here in Belgium the same. Prices are up massively. 20 to 40%yuhong - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
DRAMeXchange also shows a higher price for 4Gbit DDR4 than months ago, while 4Gbit DDR3 prices did not increase as much. I noticed that 8Gbit DDR4 is getting close to crossover now.yuhong - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
8Gbit DDR4 has hit crossover on DRAMeXchange. At the time of this writing, "DDR4 8Gb 1Gx8 2133 MHZ" is at $3.664 and "DDR4 4Gb 512Mx8 2133 MHz" is at $1.836.iwod - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Not really interested in consumer DRAM pricing, I mean they are already very very cheap. And it is properly more interesting for LPDDR4 to drop price, since that will be use in some Laptop, Smartphone and Tablets.More interested would be 32GB DIMM and 128GB DIMM drop price, so we can fit 128GB to 1TB Memory on server for very cheap. SQL and Cache Servers.
Flunk - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Past trends don't show much connection between the price of DRAM and Nand on phones and tablets. Most of the time then manufacturer pockets the difference.yuhong - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
Interestingly, even 32GB DDR3 LR-DIMMs has been dropping in price. I wonder if this is due to oversupply.tipoo - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Offset a bit by the CAD being down to 76 cents American now :(Story of my life is piece together a nice mid range PC on PCpartpicker, oh nice I got it under 1000 - crap, forgot to hit the Canadian flag. Price is now 33% higher plus 15% tax plus the "we hate canadians" markup companies like to do despite nafta. Delete build and cry self to sleep. Repeat monthly.
JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Nobody hates Canada; That's just the price of doing business there in Canada, along with the taxes and other such exchange related problems that businesses are facing and then unfortunately have to reflect down to you, the consumer.If you're upset about Newegg charging you ~40% more than the American website does, then either go across the border and have your parts purchased and mailed there for cheap, or complain to your government officials about the relatively weak Canadian dollar. This really just boils down to economic policy and what your government is doing about it.
andrewaggb - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Well to be fair, the whole 'buy america' thing comes across as 'hates Canada'. There's some pretty ridiculous stuff that has resulted, like tearing down a bridge for too much Canadian Steel and stuff like that. And Obama really had it out for the Alberta pipeline, despite plenty of US oil projects and pipelines being built.Anyways, I doubt our current government will do much to improve the $. I think it's more about social policy, child care, etc this time around.