As we have been saying for several weeks, the 2023 trend is not crazy. If some people abuse negative terms and apocalyptic figures pushing the most positive individual to sink into depression, we prefer to regularly put this trend into perspective with the 2 years of “covidian” madness. For better or worse, the electronics market is also governed by the law of supply and demand. This is also true for the price of memory chips. So, after many months of explosive and irrational demand, the figures are becoming more logical again. A situation that has one merit, however: to bring the price down some more. This phenomenon should be observed during a large part of this year with impacts on the price of our memory sticks but not only.
Ram bars, SSDs…Back to reality?
TrendForce told the Wall Street Journal that DRAM prices are expected to drop 20% in Q1 and another 11% in Q2. NAND flash prices, meanwhile, are expected to fall 10% and 3% in Q1 and Q2, respectively. In recent days, several major companies in the sector have announced poor figures. Samsung reported that its operating profit for the October-December quarter is expected to fall by 69% compared to the same period a year earlier. As for SK Hynix, analysts expect to announce a loss of about $661 million in the fourth quarter. Finally, in the last few hours, Intel has also made some not very exciting announcements. Once again, since these figures are based on a distorted benchmark (covid euphoria a year earlier), the declines can only be significant. The impact on the prices of SSDs, RAM and probably graphics cards should be felt at least until the beginning of the school year 2023, i.e. the end of summer.
