Apple and Micron's long-standing grievances erupt, China's alternative capacity could become the biggest winner.

Mars Finance News, June 27: This week, the trade dispute between Apple and memory chip giants represented by Micron and SK Hynix continued to escalate. On Thursday, Apple announced formal price increases for multiple products including MacBook and iPad due to a surge in memory prices, and issued a statement saying that it “can no longer continue to protect consumers.” After the news broke, Apple’s stock price plunged, and its market value was wiped out by about $265 billion.

Just the day before, Micron released an epic-level earnings report that far exceeded market expectations, which drove the company’s stock price up by 13%. On the day Micron’s financial report was released, its CEO, Sumit Sadana, “reflected on past hardships,” implying that during the last period of industry downturn, Apple took advantage of negotiation leverage to sharply squeeze prices, severely weakening the company’s ability to invest in production capacity—and planting the seeds for the severe memory shortage that exists today. Apple’s price-squeezing led suppliers such as Micron and SK Hynix to record huge losses in 2022 and 2023, while in the same period Apple profited more than $16 billion through iPhone pricing strategies across different storage capacities.

Market analysis points out that Apple and the memory chip giants have harbored long-standing grievances. Apple’s passive decision to raise prices this time may indicate that there are uncertainties in the long-term cooperation between the two sides. On the other hand, Apple has taken the initiative to seek alternatives: it is lobbying the Trump administration and pushing to include companies such as China’s CXMT memory in its supply chain. Analysts say this is Apple’s most realistic solution at present. Apple urgently needs China’s DRAM and NAND production capacity to counter the rising trend among competitors such as Huawei, ensuring that Apple products maintain market share in China and around the world.

Public information shows that CXMT is expected to list on the Shanghai STAR Market with a valuation of $500 billion. As a core DRAM company in China, its current production capacity mainly supplies customers in China. Its core customer base includes AI chip startups such as Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, and Cambricon, as well as terminal manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Lenovo. The company’s products currently focus on general-purpose DRAM, while rapidly shifting toward HBM to support AI computing power.