NAND and DRAM: a priori left to pull down for a while

DRAM and NAND

At the beginning of August, we could see together that the memory DDR3 and DDR4 had in the end not been able to maintain its upward trend started at the beginning of spring, quite the contrary, it even started in the other direction! But faced with this kind of curve, the questions often remain the same: "Will it last?" , “do I have to rush to buy my RAM”? Well, know that the answers would be a priori “yes” and “no”, respectively! In any case, it is the Taiwanese newspaper Digitimes that tells it behind its paying wall based on its anonymous sources.

Thus, memory prices in general, as far as we are concerned, for DRAM and NAND, are expected to fall by another rapid 10% in the fourth quarter of the year, which implies that store prices should logically still fall well, for our happiness (and that of our PC)! Moreover, the Taiwanese newspaper predicts that this fall will continue potentially until the dawn of the 2nd quarter of 2021.

What’s the root cause?

 A saturated market because of over-supply and under-consumption — Micron and SK Hynix had previously complained of lower demand. The origin of the problem would also come from the fact that many buyers rushed into stocks at the beginning of the epidemic out of fear of a shortage, but which never really took place, an overinflated inventory that they now obviously have to liquidate. Finally, this development is also the opposite of the forecasts for the end of 2019, where analysts were speculating on a potential progressive 40% increase in DRAM tariffs, for example. Of course, not many people could already guess the exact scenario of 2020.

On the other hand, the prices of the different types of memories naturally also fluctuate according to the seasons, It is also a safe bet that many potential buyers are currently camping on their hardware while waiting to discover the next novelties such as the GeForce RTX 3000, Radeon RX 6000/RDNA2 or Ryzen 4000 (Zen 3)! Thus, if a DRAM or SSD upgrade is already on the program, it would be preferable to not wait for everyone to rush onto the new equipment and for the manufacturers to readjust the production flows.