TapTechNews on May 22, according to a report by the South Korean media Bussinesskorea yesterday, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix currently hold a conservative attitude towards increasing the production of general-purpose memory chips.
TapTechNews learned that the contract price of 8Gb DDR4 DRAM general-purpose memory increased by 17% month-on-month in April, but the price of 128Gb (16Gx8) MLC general-purpose flash memory for portable storage devices such as flash drives remained unchanged.
This is mainly because the earthquake in Taiwan region at the beginning of April affected the memory production capacity of Micron, and promoted the demand for general-purpose memory to rise in a short time. Overall, the demand for general-purpose memory chips has not really recovered, and downstream enterprises still hold a considerable amount of inventory.
On the other hand, the international geopolitical situation is currently in an unstable state. The situation in the Middle East is tense recently, and the US presidential election year also brings additional instability factors to global trade. Under the intertwined influence of these two factors, the visibility of the demand for general-purpose memory chips has been reduced.
In addition, under the AI boom, the demand for HBM memory is strong, and the wafer consumption of HBM is 2 to 3 times that of general DRAM. Against the background of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix actively expanding the production of HBM, the wafer input of general DRAM is bound to be suppressed.
In the second half of this year, the release of heavyweight smartphones such as Apple's iPhone 16 series and Samsung's Galaxy Z series will be ushered in. The report predicts that this new wave of mobile phones is expected to be an opportunity for the original factory to increase the production of standard memory chips.