The price of DRAM and NAND Flash in May keeps dropping in May

According to the industry research of CINNO Research, the latest update of memory price reflects that the demand in the smartphone and laptop market is still weak, DRAM and flash memory prices continue to decline in May, and the inventory of consumer market is still in high level. Moreover, the profit of most memory suppliers has faced a sharp drop in the first quarter. Under such serious situation, the way of offering lower price is hard to stimulate the demands on memory products, so manufacturers are not willing to make further discount on price. The quarterly average prices of 4GB and 8GB's PC memory modules will fall to $16 and $32, it is been down about 27% comparing to the first quarter. We will expect more breakthroughs in third quarter, we believe that the CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD have respectively demonstrated the future technology route planning at the Taipei International computer Show 2019, which will launch a series of new generation products with 7nm process and 10nm process platform. As the supply of Intel CPU gets better, the shortage situation in the third quarter is expected to be resolved, which will keep up with the previous demand for personal computers. Finally we also expect the price decline to converge to 10-13% in the third quarter and further shorten to 7-9% in the fourth quarter.

picture from ：CINNO
 
Regarding the flash memory, as the price of flash memory has previously fallen to the break-even point, the room for price negotiations has become limited, furthermore, Micron is not willing to bring more discounts in May, and the other flash memory companies have also followed up and no longer reduce prices, so the price of flash memory chips for 256Gb remains at $1.9 to US $2, and there has been a supply chain restructuring in Shenzhen in the past two weeks. We believe that the situation of the market at low prices will improve, and the decline in flash memory prices will be more restrained in June. Looking forward to the third quarter, shipments of solid-state hard drives driven by new iPhone stocks and increased demand for personal computers will stabilize, and the decline in flash memory prices will be reduced to less than 3%, which will help improve the financial structure and profit margins of the industry.