NAND Flash memory prices could rise 40 per cent this year

[HEXUS]

Analysts weigh backlog due to power outage, data centre product planning & other factors.

Read more.

[Smudger]

Oh no, prices are getting too low, whose factory are we going to set fire to this year?

* please note, I am in no way encouraging anyone to set fire to a chip-making factory, or any sort of factory. Arson is bad, m'kay?

[blokeinkent]

Right lads. It's time to bend over and grease up -- you all know the usual routine

[Zak33]

Right lads. It's time to bend over and grease up -- you all know the usual routine

does seem like that, doesn't it?
even a 20% rise would be a biggun but upto 40% would be a serious pain in the ... greased area

[philehidiot]

Well, I was considering an upgrade next year.

Guess not.

I could buy the memory now, I suppose. But I don't wanna.

Actually considering Optane, but then realising I can't be bothered working hard enough to be able to afford it.

[MonkFish]

https://hexus.net/business/news/comp...ys-trendforce/

Oh looky here what a surprise. The sooner china brings on line some DRAM factories the better it would seem. It's the only way of keeping these other companies even slightly honest.

[watercooled]

I wonder if this is the same catastrophising source which predicted huge price rises last year? To me it all seems like a load of speculative nonsense, but if they play the same game for long enough they might end up being correct eventually, purely by coincidence?

Citing wafer costs as a factor is also a bit suspect for this source given how minute a portion of the total cost of NAND that actually makes up...

Supplier inventories are low now are they? https://www.techpowerup.com/262566/m...-dram-and-nand

On the flipside, the resulting drop in output could help Samsung push out its swelling NAND flash and DRAM inventory, reports Yonhap, citing an analyst.

Can't have it both ways!

The restrictions on large-scale chemical supply between Japan and Korea also seem to have slackened recently.

[LSG501]

It's almost like they don't want people to buy their products.... only the absolute hardcore or desperately in need of something with nands in will pay a 40% increase in prices....

I am/was looking to upgrade around the end of this year to a zen 3 (aka ryzen 4000)assuming no delays but if the prices are stupid I'll just hold off until the prices go down, my current pc isn't exactly 'slow' for most things...

[watercooled]

It's almost like they don't want people to buy their products.... only the absolute hardcore or desperately in need of something with drams in will pay a 40% increase in prices.

This article relates to NAND, not DRAM.

[LSG501]

This article relates to NAND, not DRAM.

typo, dram was also mentioned in the samsung part of the article and in a post slightly above mine.

[watercooled]

I just thought it made sense in the context i.e. being linked to a new build, whereas SSDs are more portable between builds.

Either way, I half panic-bought a spare SSD last time this sort of article was doing the rounds. Prices went up by like 5% then plummeted in the following months! Was a worthwhile purchase regardless, thankfully, but if you look back over the past few years it's really nothing new to read about catastrophic memory price rises.

Just some more examples to choose from, in 2019 alone:
https://hexus.net/business/news/comp...bound-shortly/
https://www.channelpro.co.uk/news/11...torage-drought
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/ne...htens-2019-07/
https://epsnews.com/2019/07/18/dram-...d-for-rebound/

They're just a few I found with a quick search and some are a bit more reasonable in their wording, but I do remember reading some less reasonable ones around the summer of 2019. You know what it's like on the echo chamber of the Internet - some source citing 'inside knowledge' makes a random claim and articles referencing it just pop up everywhere, with little to no multi-sourcing, in the name of click-bait and sky-is-falling headlines.

[watercooled]

Looking at the reasons given one-by-one, all IMO of course.

In summer, a power outage at the Kioxia and WDC operated Yokkaichi fab meant that price declines for eMMC/UFS and SSD products halted in the following quarter (Q3 2019)

We've already seen this filter through the market. Nonsense.

Around the same time the market saw a sharp uptick in wafer prices (approx 20 per cent up)

Wafer cost is almost negligible in final NAND pricing. Nonsense.

A supply shortage of enterprise SSDs will likely be felt more stringly as we move into 2020 as data centre clients gear up to expand storage

Very ambiguous claim. Why is there a shortage? Has every large enterprise customer just decided to make huge purchases for some random reason? Dubious.

The mobile devices sector appeared to be gearing up for a particularly active period as we enter 2020

Like every year then? Nonsense.

New games consoles using NAND Flash for primary storage will be mainstream by the end of the year

This one could hold some credence given the new consoles will likely ship with a fair amount of NAND. Having said that I don't know whether the size of this market would be large enough to make a noticeable dent in commodity pricing, and I would think it would still be dwarfed by mobile memory devices. Plausible but I doubt it's nearly significant enough to raise prices substantially by itself.

Capacity planning and bit shipment has seen its lowest rate of increase YoY ever - at a time when NAND Flash demand will be surging

Two parts to this one. Capacity planning is low because demand increase has been slowing, relatively speaking! Why exactly will demand be surging again? Nonsense.

Supplier inventories are said to be low

By whom? Because according to the article I linked above, at least some suppliers are struggling with excess inventories which has been driving prices down!! Nonsense.

BTW I'm not targeting this as Hexus or their article, the same reasons are mentioned elsewhere but are so dubious I felt the need to pick them apart. Overall, perhaps all things combined may tilt pricing upwards slightly, but volatility is par for the course in this sector!

Obviously I ain't no market analyst and have no 'inside knowledge', just using some basic reasoning based on publicly available information and some knowledge of how the industry works.

[nobodyspecial]

China, the way to make your favorite hated company honest...LOL. Dumbest statement of the year? Bill Clinton let them into the WTO, and they've systematically destroyed tons of businesses because of it. NO, try something else please. Block ALL things China and bankrupt them. Any country doing business with China now pays higher tariffs to sell to USA. Punish everyone until china has NO business partners.

The less business you do with china, the better off YOU and your country are. PERIOD. It is bad enough they steal you blind, no point in helping them kill your economy. They can't get it done by stealing alone (can't win tech that way, it evolves too fast), so pressure must be put on all allies to avoid china. Forget the EASY quick buck today, as it will cost you ALL your bucks in the future when they OWN you after bankrupting your economy. I'm more than happy to pay a little sting for a few years until we make EVERYTHING china used to make for us (which by the way we USED to make ourselves anyway...LOL). Keep going Trump, bring back the 70,000 factories they killed and make it so NOBODY can ever go back there without BRUTAL govt fines, IRS up your butt, etc etc. Make it IMPOSSIBLE financially to build anything in china (they must import it all or die from USA, no USA plants in china!).

If you don't understand who china is at this point, you haven't read their PLAN. Google it, they aren't afraid of telling you they are going to OWN you soon (and trade routes, etc). Fight them now with money, pressure, or fight for REAL in a decade or two with massive bloodshed. Or heck, attack now, while we can knock their entire air force down with F35's without being seen, then have our way with them bombing until no military/govt buildings are left. Then tell them welcome to your new country, we suggest a republic with our constitution, if you are brave enough to keep them (kill all lobbyists daily, term limits enforced, makes the job easier). Heck just make it a felony to be a lobbyist. Done. Or, ok, you can be one, just can't pay ANYONE money. Lobby all you want, but if you write a check after doing it, death. That way, congress does what the people voted them to do instead of what the highest bidder told them to do.

I could go all day about rules for THEM (god knows they've made enough rules that only govern US, and do NOT apply to them), but it's 1am and they don't listen anyway...Duh, it's the checks. Just make sure if you start the war trump, end it in weeks by bombing until it's over (don't have to claim war even for what 60 days? It can be over in a month if you just bomb all day). No more decade+ wars because people don't get that WAR IS HELL. Kill massively and quickly, and come home alive because you don't give a rats behind about THEM or how many you have to hit to get the bad guys. Forget surgical strikes. That takes decades. During Iraq war, we flew 100K sorties in a month. Make that look like child's play in a sandbox and it will be over in weeks. 400K sorties in a month. War over. Or get ready for another MAO time, where 30-80mil die again. Learn history, you'll like USA a lot more than China

Oh well HAPPY NEW YEAR. Hope you guys get a real Brexit this year.

Re: Watercooled - many good points here. As an owner of a lot of MU, I'm not buying half the stuff in this post either Lots of claims, but not sure who's claiming all this crap. Links to data for all the dubious stuff please. I'd love to believe this article, but I can't build a case to prove this article today. I can build watercooled case though and it wouldn't be too difficult. There is a lot of public knowledge out there as OP said. This isn't rocket science, and is highly documented quarterly by many paywalls (which filters out to us all at some point to some extent). That said, recovery does come, ALWAYS in this sector. Classic boom bust, but quicker recovery today due to many more on tech and many more things chewing up data.

[jnutt]

Glad I took the plunge last year. Not usually so lucky.

[Tabbykatze]

China, the way to make your favorite hated company honest...LOL. Dumbest statement of the year? Bill Clinton let them into the WTO, and they've systematically destroyed tons of businesses because of it. NO, try something else please. Block ALL things China and bankrupt them. Any country doing business with China now pays higher tariffs to sell to USA. Punish everyone until china has NO business partners.

The less business you do with china, the better off YOU and your country are. PERIOD. It is bad enough they steal you blind, no point in helping them kill your economy. They can't get it done by stealing alone (can't win tech that way, it evolves too fast), so pressure must be put on all allies to avoid china. Forget the EASY quick buck today, as it will cost you ALL your bucks in the future when they OWN you after bankrupting your economy. I'm more than happy to pay a little sting for a few years until we make EVERYTHING china used to make for us (which by the way we USED to make ourselves anyway...LOL). Keep going Trump, bring back the 70,000 factories they killed and make it so NOBODY can ever go back there without BRUTAL govt fines, IRS up your butt, etc etc. Make it IMPOSSIBLE financially to build anything in china (they must import it all or die from USA, no USA plants in china!).

If you don't understand who china is at this point, you haven't read their PLAN. Google it, they aren't afraid of telling you they are going to OWN you soon (and trade routes, etc). Fight them now with money, pressure, or fight for REAL in a decade or two with massive bloodshed. Or heck, attack now, while we can knock their entire air force down with F35's without being seen, then have our way with them bombing until no military/govt buildings are left. Then tell them welcome to your new country, we suggest a republic with our constitution, if you are brave enough to keep them (kill all lobbyists daily, term limits enforced, makes the job easier). Heck just make it a felony to be a lobbyist. Done. Or, ok, you can be one, just can't pay ANYONE money. Lobby all you want, but if you write a check after doing it, death. That way, congress does what the people voted them to do instead of what the highest bidder told them to do.

I could go all day about rules for THEM (god knows they've made enough rules that only govern US, and do NOT apply to them), but it's 1am and they don't listen anyway...Duh, it's the checks. Just make sure if you start the war trump, end it in weeks by bombing until it's over (don't have to claim war even for what 60 days? It can be over in a month if you just bomb all day). No more decade+ wars because people don't get that WAR IS HELL. Kill massively and quickly, and come home alive because you don't give a rats behind about THEM or how many you have to hit to get the bad guys. Forget surgical strikes. That takes decades. During Iraq war, we flew 100K sorties in a month. Make that look like child's play in a sandbox and it will be over in weeks. 400K sorties in a month. War over. Or get ready for another MAO time, where 30-80mil die again. Learn history, you'll like USA a lot more than China

Oh well HAPPY NEW YEAR. Hope you guys get a real Brexit this year.

Re: Watercooled - many good points here. As an owner of a lot of MU, I'm not buying half the stuff in this post either Lots of claims, but not sure who's claiming all this crap. Links to data for all the dubious stuff please. I'd love to believe this article, but I can't build a case to prove this article today. I can build watercooled case though and it wouldn't be too difficult. There is a lot of public knowledge out there as OP said. This isn't rocket science, and is highly documented quarterly by many paywalls (which filters out to us all at some point to some extent). That said, recovery does come, ALWAYS in this sector. Classic boom bust, but quicker recovery today due to many more on tech and many more things chewing up data.

Oh shut up xD

[blokeinkent]

Can somebody start a whip around for nobodyspecial please? His keyboard seems to have developed a sticky CAPS LOCK and will need replacing. Also the private counselling fees he'll occur once he realises he's a Trumpite