The memory sphere has turned into the epitome of a hysteria-obsessed lady of Victorian England. As evidence, look no further than the commodity DRAM sector, where a modest spot price reduction has spurred everything from death-knell pronouncements to stock price crashes. Yet, the truly big players like Samsung have maintained their placidity and appear bent on hiking prices like clockwork.
Samsung has hiked the prices of its memory products by an average of 30 percent for Q2 2026 after implementing a 100 percent price increase for Q1
According to the South Korean publication ETNews, Samsung is now supplying DRAM products at a quarter-over-quarter price premium of around 30 percent. Critically, these price increases come on the proverbial heels of a 100 percent year-over-year average price hike in Q1 2026!
Do note that Samsung's latest 30 percent price increase represents an average price hike that spans multiple DRAM products, including High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI as well as commodity DRAM for servers, PCs, and smartphones.
This means that if a unit of DRAM from Samsung costs 10,000 Korean Won at the start of 2025, it would have cost 20,000 Won in Q1 2026 and would now retail for 26,000 Won.
What's more, now that Samsung appears to have instituted these price hikes, SK hynix and Micron are also expected to follow suit with inflationary pricing for their own DRAM products, puncturing the ongoing thesis of a crash in the prices for commodity DRAM.
Of course, the prices of the older DDR4 chips are under pressure at the moment. However, this is more a function of hoarded inventory getting panic-liquidated rather than a systemic collapse in demand. According to DRAMeXchange, the average fixed contract price for PC DRAM (DDR4 8Gb) was flat month-over-month, as of the end of March.
Moreover, according to SemiAnalysis, LPDDR5 contract prices, which are currently hovering at around $10/GB after undergoing a 3x increase since Q1 2025, are expected to undergo a double-digit percentage increase in 2027 as well.
This means that the prevailing situation for the smartphone sphere is only slated to worsen. As we noted recently, DRAM costs now make up a whopping 35 percent of the Bill of Materials (BOM) of a given entry-level handset, while NAND costs add another 19 percent. Together, these two components now make up a whopping 54 percent of a budget smartphone's total cost!
Samsung Is Unfazed by the DRAM Crash Hysteria, Raises Prices by 30% for Q2 After Doubling Them in Q1
Samsung has hiked the prices of its memory products by an average of 30 percent for Q2 after implementing a 100 percent price increase for Q1.
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