Due to sluggish demand for personal computers and home appliances, sales of memory are declining due to inventory adjustments by personal computer manufacturers. As a result, DRAM revenue fell about 30% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter of 2022. This is an unprecedented change of circumstances. At the same time, Micron and SK Hynix increased their market share slightly in Q3, while Samsung and smaller suppliers declined.
DRAM sales down 28.9%
DRAM industry revenue in Q3 2022 was $18,187 million, down 28.9% from $25,594 million in Q2 2022. trend forceMemory contract prices fell by 10% to 15% during the quarter, while spot prices fell further. TrendForce analysts claim that sales of all types of memory, including his DRAM for consumer electronics, PCs and even servers, have fallen as producers have adjusted inventories due to slowing demand. increase.
As the top memory supplier, Samsung remained the top global DRAM leader in terms of revenue, despite a quarter-on-quarter revenue decline of 33.5%, although its market share was down from 43.5% in Q2. dropped to 40.7%. 2022.
SK Hynix lost 25.2% QoQ of DRAM sales, but its market share increased to 28.8% in Q3. Micron’s DRAM sales continued to decline by 23.3% in Q3 2022, but its share increased from 24.5% to 26.4%. In fact, Micron’s decline in his DRAM was the lowest in the industry.
In contrast, smaller manufacturers such as Nanya, Winbond and PSMC lost market share with revenues down 37.4% to 40.8%.
DRAM makers cut production
One way memory manufacturers can stabilize the prices of their products is to limit DRAM bit production by slowing capacity expansion or slowing the transition to more advanced manufacturing techniques. Withholding well-equipped fabs is a very expensive move that leads to huge losses as expensive fab equipment has to be depreciated, whereas delaying the transition to new production nodes is a huge cost to DRAM. It’s a relatively easy way to limit bit output growth.
Apparently, this is exactly what memory makers will do in the next few quarters. Samsung plans to roll out its new P3L fab next year, boosting DRAM production capacity, but suspending migration to new nodes. SK Hynix will also slow the transition to more advanced manufacturing processes at its various fabs. His Micron, which has just started production of his LPDDR5X memory using the 1β node in Japan, has no plans to aggressively scale production using this manufacturing process. Additionally, TrendForce believes Micron could implement more aggressive ways to reduce his DRAM output.
Smaller DRAM makers will follow the larger makers in node migration, but their actions will have limited price impact as they dominated about 4% of the market in Q3 2022. target.
Good for end users?
Falling memory prices are generally a good thing for end users (and PC makers to some extent), especially if they move to DDR5 memory this year. However, once demand stabilizes or strengthens after DRAM makers cut production, prices will inevitably rise, so it probably makes sense to plan an upgrade now.
