📌 Server DRAM Prices Rise While Consumer Storage Trends Diverge
Storage prices have not risen across the board. The more evident change at present is that server DRAM remains on an upward price trajectory, while consumer storage has already stabilized and moved sideways. For storage suppliers and hardware manufacturers, what truly matters is not a single price index, but which categories of products are seeing price increases and the structure of each party’s procurement.
BofA’s survey of memory manufacturers, spot distributors, and OEMs shows that the average selling prices of most DRAM products rose 20% to 30% quarter over quarter in the third quarter, while server DRAM prices remain firm. This indicates that demand related to data centers can still support relatively strong bargaining power. If this trend continues, improvements in revenue and earnings for the relevant products will be reflected more directly on the side of server memory suppliers.
But the consumer market has not strengthened in tandem. Consumer storage prices are currently declining slightly and trending toward stability, following a different trajectory from the server side. Therefore, using the increase in server DRAM prices to infer the direction of the entire storage industry, or further inferring that all end-user hardware will face cost pressures of the same magnitude, may be overly simplistic.
For end-device manufacturers, whether cost pressures are significant depends on the proportions of server, consumer, and other storage products in their procurement, as well as whether price increases can be passed on to downstream customers. The information currently available confirms price divergence among product categories, but is not yet sufficient to quantify the impact on the gross margins and cash flows of specific companies. Going forward, it will be necessary to observe whether server DRAM price increases can continue and whether consumer prices begin rising again.
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