DRAM Industry in 2024 Strong Growth and Future Outlook
TapTechNews August 15th news, according to the research report of TrendForce today, the global DRAM memory industry achieved revenue of 22.901 billion US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 163.591 billion RMB) in the second quarter of 2024, showing a 24.8% growth quarter-on-quarter.
Querying the previous reports of TrendForce, the revenue of the DRAM industry in the second quarter of 2023 was 11.428 billion US dollars. This means that the global DRAM memory industry achieved a year-on-year increase of 100.4% in the previous quarter.
TrendForce said that the reason why the revenue of the DRAM memory industry showed both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth in the second quarter of 2024 is that the shipments of mainstream products expanded and the contract price maintained an upward trend, and the specific increase fell in the range of 13% to 18%.
The shipments of the three major memory original factories, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron, all increased in the second quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2024.
Specifically for Samsung Electronics, its average bit sales unit price increased by 17-19% quarter-on-quarter. Coupled with a slight increase in shipments, it drove its DRAM revenue to 9.820 billion US dollars in the second quarter of 2024, with a 22% quarter-on-quarter increase, and its market share slightly decreased by 1% but still occupied the first place.
While SK Hynix benefited from the successful mass production of HBM3e memory, both the bit shipments and the average sales unit price increased significantly, pushing the single-quarter DRAM revenue to 7.911 billion US dollars, a sharp increase of 38.7% quarter-on-quarter, and the market share also increased to 34.5%.
Micron, on the other hand, due to factors such as de-stocking of low-cost 1bnm DDR5 defective products the average selling price slightly decreased, but still benefited from the 15-16% quarter-on-quarter increase in bit shipments, achieving 4.500 billion US dollars in DRAM revenue, a 14.1% quarter-on-quarter increase, and the market share decreased to 19.6%.
TrendForce said that the contract price increase for the third quarter of 2024 agreed by most DRAM original factories and downstream PC, OEM, and CPS (cloud service providers) operators was higher than expected.
The agency accordingly raised its expected quarterly increase in the general memory (ConventionalDRAM) to 8% to 13%, about 5% higher than the previous estimate.
From the demand perspective, since the second quarter of this year, Chinese CPS operators have actively purchased and stocked server memory, and the purchase scale has doubled compared to the same period last year, driving the price of server DRAM upward, and the negotiation of PC DRAM contract prices also tilted in favor of the supplier.
From the supply perspective, in order to meet the HBM3e orders in time, Samsung Electronics has already started wafer production for DRAM required for HBM3e in the factory in advance, which will affect the 1αnm DDR5 production schedule in the second half of 2024. Similar situations also occur with SK Hynix. Therefore, the DRAM price is difficult to fall in the next few quarters.