In recent years, the price trend of memory has affected many people. Compared with the price of Graphics, CPU and SDD, the price of memory is less stable. It can be said that memory is the most annoying one of all DIY accessories.
Memory trends
According to the past memory market, you will find that the rise and fall of memory is like a wave line. Before and after 2012, the price was low. In 2013 it significantly rose. In 2014, it fell a little. In 2015 it was near trough, in 2016's mid-term it began to continue rising. In 2017 it reached to the peak and it dropped in 2018. By 2019, the price of memory has dropped by more than 30% compared with the end of last year. Now the price of DDR4 memory has reached a new low for more than three years.
In JD and Taobao. the price of famous ADATA colorful DDR4 2666 8G is between 39$ and 42$, and the price of 16G set is about 89$.
the cheapest period June of 2016
The price of Kingston hacker's Fury lightning series DDR4 2666 8GB is between 40$ and 42$ and the price of 16G set is about 89$. Even the price of 8G capacity of some common brand memory has already fallen to about 36$.
On June of 2016, the lowest price of Kingston hacker's Fury lightning series DDR4 2666 8GB is 29$B in JD, which is the cheapest period.
According the data the current price of 8G memory is actually close to the low price of this year's memory. However, at present, most people still choose to wait and see. After all, most people still can't get rid of the psychology of buying up and not buying down. The price is good now, but I'm afraid it will fall after buying. But when the price rises, buying is not the same. Although people are very angry about the price rise, they will go up at least for a short time after buying.
But you should know that the price increase of memory is different from other’s hardware price rise. When the price of SSD increases, we can choose other hard disks. When the price of the graphics card increases, you can choose to use low configuration or core display; when the price of the Intel processor increases, AMD is still available. However, when the price of the memory increases, I'm sorry, I even won't give you low configuration. So, what is the trend of memory price in the future?
The main trend in short period is slow fall.
As we all know, the rise and fall of commodities are related with the supply and demand of the market. There are many reasons for the decrease of memory price in 2018, such as the weak demand of terminal products like PC, server and smartphone, the mass production of 96 layer NAND, the release of production capacity and so on. But in the end, the NAND flash market is still oversupplied, so the price began to fall continuously, and the overall decline has reached about 65%.
Chips manufacturers are not happy.
However, some people are happy and some are unhappy. As we all know, in the global DRAM memory particle market, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron account for the most market. By the third quarter of 2018, three memory particle giants, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, have a global market share of 95.7%, while others can be ignored.
Recently, Samsung released the warning information of Q1 quarterly financial report, pointing out that the revenue of Q1 this year was about 52 trillion Won, decreasing of 14%. The operating profit is 6.2 trillion Won, a year-on-year decreasing of 60.4%, which is also a sharp decline of Samsung's profit for two consecutive quarters. Samsung's profit decline is closely related to the price decline of NAND flash and DRAM, which will seriously affect the companies in the memory chip industry.
Not only Samsung's financial report was affected, but Micron's net profit in Q2 fell more than 50% year on year in 2019. NAND ASP fell within 20% month on month, and Bit's shipment increased month on month. DRAM ASP fell by less than 20% on a month on month basis, and bit shipments fell by 10% ~ 15% on a month on month basis.
Measures
For these decline trends, the three giants have already taken some measures. After all, they are familiar to theses tricks.
Therefore, in order to improve the oversupply of NAND flash and DRAM and maintain the enterprise profit to the maximum extent, the three giants have reduced capital expenditure to balance the market supply and demand, and delayed the 96 layer technology expansion plan, thus reducing production capacity. However, the response measures are not effective so fast, and the price of memory will be in a state of slow decline in the short term. Of course, if you want to keep a low price, there is a precondition, that is, there will be no more "burning" or "flooding".
Natural disaster? Man-made disaster?
Many users know that flooding and burning situations are common in memory industry.
In July 2011, Thailand's flood flooded the hard disk factory of Western Digital, resulting in a sharp fall in production capacity and a rupture in the supply chain of spare parts. In the next year, the hard disk prices of Western Digital and SaaS increased by at least 20%. I don't know what happened to SaaS.
On the afternoon of 4th September 2013, a fire broke out in the Wuxi factory of Hynix Semiconductor. The smoke from the fire can be seen tens of kilometers away. It may involve toxic chemicals. The smell around the plant is pungent. The price of DRAM rose because of the fire, and the price of memory rose as early as 2013, and even led to the rise of PC production cost.
Fire scene of No.3 workshop of Wuxi Jianding Electronic Factory
On 9th May 2014, No.3 workshop of Wuxi Jinding Electronic Factory, the world first memory factory, suffered a fire. The factory mainly produces printed circuit boards and mainly supply memory modules and hard disks, and the supply of memory modules ranks first in the world. It is easy to know that the factory is significant for the whole industry. Fortunately, from the memory market of that year, it did not cause a big impact.
On 6th June 2018, the second factory project in Wuxi been building by SK Hynix also suffered a fire. Even it didn’t affect the present production line, it affected the new factory construction.
No matter burning or flooding will affect the price of memory in some extent, the secret among that makes us ponder. However, the memory price is still slowly falling in a short-term.
the present buying suggestions
If you need to install recently, you can actually spend more money on high-capacity ones. After all, buy early and enjoy early. But if it's not very urgent, you can wait until black friday to buy. On the one hand, around black friday, a number of e-commerce businesses, such as amazone, hugdiy.com ,ebay and shopee, will have various activities at that time, so it will be a little cheaper.
On the other hand, according to the industry, the real lowest price of memory is in the June of this year and the time will last a long period. The premise is that there isn’t natural disaster or man-made disaster.