Q2 Consumer LPDDR5X Prices Rise 89%

Market research firm SigmaIntell announced on the 22nd that prices for consumer product categories rose in the second quarter of this year due to a memory supply and demand imbalance.
In the low power DRAM (LPDDR) product category, the price of the LPDDR4X 4GB product rose 75% quarter on quarter, while the LPDDR5X 12GB product rose 89%. This is the result of intensified supply competition as LPDDR memory is adopted in next generation server GPUs such as NVIDIA's AI computing platform Vera Rubin. Memory manufacturers widened the scope of price increases for consumer product memory used in smartphones and PCs. Some customers have accepted the price increases, and this has already been reflected in the market.
SigmaIntell explained that "in the second quarter, production capacity was prioritized for high value added products such as HBM, server DRAM, and eSSD, which caused a supply shortage in consumer memory," and that "due to cost pressure, some smartphone and PC brands are adjusting their memory orders." As a result, there is a possibility that the pace of DRAM price increases will moderate in the second half of this year. In particular, demand for memory used in low end products is expected to slow more than for midrange to high end products.
Semiconductor wafer resources are being concentrated on high bandwidth memory (HBM), and consumer DRAM production capacity has been relatively scaled back as a result of the analysis. HBM is maintaining stable price levels through annual contracts with customers, but the supply and demand imbalance is still understood to be severe.
General purpose server DRAM also showed an industry wide price increase trend. As cloud companies continued to secure DRAM inventory, distribution inventory remained at a level of two to three weeks.
The consumer electronics market is under pressure. On the supply side, expanded production of high value added memory products, limited capacity for additional buildout, and low inventory levels have combined to sustain a supply shortage in consumer DRAM.
The NAND market also continued its upward trend in the second quarter. In the second quarter of this year, solid state drive (SSD) prices rose approximately 50% quarter on quarter. Enterprise NAND products (eSSD) are maintaining strong purchasing demand regardless of market price fluctuations. Expanding storage capacity in AI clusters and AI agent servers is driving demand. AI server architectures require high performance, high capacity data storage devices.
Universal Flash Storage (UFS) prices expanded by as much as 100%. This is the result of expanding eSSD demand and supply shortages spreading into the mobile and PC NAND markets. As the supply of low end NAND such as low capacity embedded multimedia cards (eMMC) is reduced, consumer NAND supply and demand has also become difficult.