Nowadays, semiconductor devices represented by DRAM have set off a wave of price increases worldwide. DRAM is one of the types of semiconductor memory products. The common product form is memory sticks. The two main application markets are PCs and smart phones. According to the official website of Jingdong Mall, the price of Kingston DDR4 2400 8G desktop memory rose from about 400 yuan to about 800 yuan in half a year. At the same time, Liu Lirong, chairman of Jinli Group, said at a media exchange meeting on September 25 that domestic mobile phones still remained in the second half of the year. Prices will rise, partly because of rising memory costs.
　　According to market survey data from Jibang Consulting Semiconductor Research Center, DRAM supply in the fourth quarter of 2016 was seriously in short supply, driving the contract price in the first quarter of 2017 to rise by more than 30%, and the prices of various products rose.
　　Behind the four consecutive quarters of DRAM price increases is the still expanding supply and demand gap. On the one hand, domestic brand mobile phone shipments continued to grow, reaching a climax in the second half of 2017, on the other hand, upstream manufacturers Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Micron Technology have a long-term monopoly on the market and have market pricing power, according to trendforce According to the data, as of the third quarter of 2016, the total market share of the three major DRAM manufacturers accounted for about 94% of the global market.
　　As one of the core hardware of smart phones, memory has always been imported. According to a securities analyst who has long tracked the semiconductor industry, memory, as an industry with obvious cyclical changes based on inventory, demand, and production capacity factors, this round of price increases has greatly increased the cost of domestic smartphone and PC manufacturers. In particular, low-end and mid-range smartphones, which have a relatively high proportion of memory costs, have eroded the fiercely competitive and low-margin smartphone industry. PC manufacturers are faced with the dual pressure of declining PC shipments and serious shortage of memory supply. At present, some smartphones have increased their prices by 100-500 yuan.
　　Until September 12, when Apple released the iPhone X with 88% to 90% screen ratio, the battle for a full-screen mobile phone that started in China since the second half of this year entered a climax.
　　Gionee Group is one of the participants. "The cost of mobile phone manufacturers has been rising." Liu Lirong, chairman of Gionee Group, who launched a new generation of full-screen mobile phone products M7 on September 25, said at the media exchange that the current memory capacity has not followed. In order to meet the demand, price increases have become an inevitable. Although Gionee insisted on using 6GB of memory and did not raise the price of mobile phones, there is a trend of price increases from the market of mobile phones. Analysts said that the current smartphone memory capacity is 2G ~ 8G, the same smartphone launched by the same manufacturer only because of different memory capacity, the price may vary from several hundred yuan to one or two thousand yuan.
　　The DRAM market structure is still dominated by three major oligarchs, Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology and SK Hynix. On July 7, Samsung Electronics' second-quarter results report showed that its operating profit reached a five-year quarterly high, with a year-on-year increase of nearly 72% to 14 trillion won (about 12.1 billion US dollars). In the performance outlook, the group stated that performance was boosted by the strong performance of the chip business. On September 27, Micron Technology posted revenue of US$6.14 billion in the fourth fiscal quarter, exceeding Wall Street analysts’ expectations and growing 91% from the same period last year. Among them, the sales of DRAM products increased by 5%. Due to the increase in the profit margin of DRAM products, the gross profit margin for the quarter was 50.7%.
　　The price increase is also related to the supply contraction of the three major manufacturers. At present, the semiconductor industry is undergoing an iterative technology upgrade, that is, 2D NAND Flash (two-dimensional flash memory) is transferred to 3D NAND Flash (three-dimensional flash memory), the three major manufacturers have carried out iterative flash memory upgrade production line construction, at the same time for DRAM development and capital The investment is relatively conservative. Analysts said that it is expected that by 2018, as 3D NAND Flash production capacity and yield rate continue to increase and new production capacity is put into production, the tight supply of memory is expected to ease.