DigiTimes: Memory Prices to Fall 10% in Q4 of 2020

[AleksandarK]

According to the latest insights from DigiTimes, industry memory prices are expected to fall by as much as 10% in Q4 of this year. DigiTimes is citing industry sources of its own for this prediction, meaning that the industry is slowly preparing to take a price hit. The reason for this price drop is that there has gathered an oversupply of memory that is resulting in price fall. That fall is expected to continue as we are headed in 2021, so the memory might become even cheaper. It is, of course, worth noting that memory manufacturers will adjust their capacities and production lines so the price fall should be adjusted in not too distant future.


View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[TheLostSwede]

It was originally expected to go up this year. It's amazing what a global pandemic can do...

 

[stimpy88]

I'm sure that a typhoon, volcano, asteroid impact, chemical spill, plague, power outage and/or fire will be able to sort this downturn in profits out.

 

[Vayra86]

I'm sure that a typhoon, volcano, asteroid impact, chemical spill, plague, power outage and/or fire will be able to sort this downturn in profits out.

Well, with global economies taking a 10% or bigger hit all over the place, I think they might find themselved priced way out of the market pretty soon for a lot of regions. Which will reduce demand, and pull pricing back down. That is what's happened here.

 

[watzupken]

It was originally expected to go up this year. It's amazing what a global pandemic can do...

The pandemic caused severe business disruptions globally, which in turn killed a lot of jobs. With many industries not expected to pick up in the next couple of years, demand for such products will decline when people become more prudent about spending. To be honest, I feel the demand for RAM and NAND are on a steady decline for years now. There may be cases where the prices goes up for awhile, but generally its been on a downward trend. All the manufacturers have invested loads of money expanding when mobile devices are selling like hot cakes. But fast forward to now, demand for mobile devices are declining year on year because of the ever increasing prices and incremental upgrades. There is no longer the wow factor to urge people to continuously upgrade nowadays. Therefore I don't think memory and NAND prices are able to find a solid foothold or continue to climb. While manufacturers can reduce supply, but any spare capacity will still incur losses.

 

[ebivan]

Well I really hope NAND ist next. There was already a little drop in SSD prices in the last weeks. But its time for a real drop!
I cant belive Samsung QLC storage SSDs still cost 800 bucks for 8TB, while really good and fast Desktop SSDs like MX500 go for 90$ per TB now.
With magnetic HDDs at about 200$ for 8GB, these QLC SSDs should go for no more than 300$ for 8TB.. It really is time for magnetic HDDs to become a niche product and to make room for affordable QLC SSDs for mass storage!

 

[Scour]

Yeah, QLC is overpriced, especially Samsung. But the 4TB is the cheapest and you don´t have a consumer-alternative at 8x. I think the competitors also to blame for non-having such capacities.

But still not sure if I want to use SSD, especially with QLC, for backup. My backups are stored in a cabinet and don´t see so many times a power supply. What would happen in this case?

 

[ebivan]

From what I know data on SSDs degrades over time when its not refreshed by the controller in regular intervalls. I would conclude that this degradation is more severe with QLC because the tollerances are lower than TLC or SLC. But I am no expert in this. So for cold storage HDDs would still have their place.

On the other hand, idle power draw on SSDs is only a fraction of what HDDs use. I run a backup/storage server with 10 WDreds which is idle most of the day, so by power savings, the lower possibility of drive failure and the upcoming availability of affordable 2.5Gbit networking hardware I would massively benefit from using affordable QLC drives instead. But as I said this will only be an option when prizes drop to the 35$/TB range...

 

[Nater]

Aren't a lot of us sitting on the rigs we have and not doing builds or upgrades? We're in the waiting period for the fall product launches. That includes the PS5 and Xbox whatever that people will be spending money on instead of PC gear.

 

[TheLostSwede]

The pandemic caused severe business disruptions globally, which in turn killed a lot of jobs. With many industries not expected to pick up in the next couple of years, demand for such products will decline when people become more prudent about spending. To be honest, I feel the demand for RAM and NAND are on a steady decline for years now. There may be cases where the prices goes up for awhile, but generally its been on a downward trend. All the manufacturers have invested loads of money expanding when mobile devices are selling like hot cakes. But fast forward to now, demand for mobile devices are declining year on year because of the ever increasing prices and incremental upgrades. There is no longer the wow factor to urge people to continuously upgrade nowadays. Therefore I don't think memory and NAND prices are able to find a solid foothold or continue to climb. While manufacturers can reduce supply, but any spare capacity will still incur losses.

Yeah, sorry, but you don't have a clue what you're talking about if that's what you believe.
NAND flash demand has been going up, up and up and was meant to increase a lot in terms of price this year.
If you're thinking PCs and laptops, you're not looking in the right places.
One of the major reasons NAND flash demand was going to increase this year was because Japan is switching to a new generation pachinko machines that are using NAND flash instead of NOR flash. See https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2020/07/09/2003739596
A lot of servers are continuing to move to SSD based storage as well.
Both of the new consoles launching this year are SSD based and have more RAM than previous generations, so this is also a source that has been eating up a lot of the available stock. Admittedly the "RAM" in this case i GDDR, not typical DRAM, but it still affects the market, as it might lead to higher costs when it comes to graphics cards.
Then we have mobile phones, which are getting larger and faster internal storage (UFS is technically an SSD on a chip) and more RAM. In fact, mobile phones were one of the main reasons that there was a shortage of certain types of memory for the past couple of years. Demand might be down somewhat, but 6GB is the new 4GB when it comes to RAM and most phones have 128GB of storage, rather than 64GB. Higher-end phones has even more so...
It was expected that demand and prices were going to go up this year, not down.
I suggest you read some industry information before making random guesses based on your own opinions, as they don't matter, facts do on the other hand.

 

[birdie]

"preparing to take a price hit"

WUT? Memory has been hugely overpriced for the past five years. If anything it just means that their insane margins will become less impudent that they've been for quite some time.

 

[Vayra86]

"preparing to take a price hit"

WUT? Memory has been hugely overpriced for the past five years. If anything it just means that their insane margins will become less impudent that they've been for quite some time.

R&D costs man! Its super difficult to iterate on the same product again and again, almost nobody does it!

/s

 

[kn00tcn]

the delusional bird is at it again, lowest prices ever were just under a year ago, there is no hugely overpriced for 5 years nonsense, it's not 2018 anymore