DDR4 price has fallen for more than half a year, agents do more losses, DDR5 commercial in the second half of the year can save the decline?

As we all know, DRAM, as an important part of the memory, also has a pivotal position in the semiconductor industry chain, however, drAM prices have peaked in the third quarter since the first half of last year, and then fell more than once, at present, there is still no trend to stop falling.

Some agents told the author that the demand is sluggish, coupled with Apple, domestic mobile phone factories are cutting orders, the market situation is not very good, so the spot price has been falling, and now there is an upside down.

Overall demand is sluggish, and DDR4 continues to fall in price

According to the data, the memory market mainly includes DRAM and Flash, the sales of the two together account for about 98% of the entire storage market, semiconductor consulting agency IC Insights previously expected that the proportion of sales of the two will increase to 99% in 2021, and the overall shipment volume will account for 82% of the memory market.

From the perspective of the proportion of the two, DRAM is the highest shipment and sales of the storage market, according to IC Insights statistics forecast, the global DRAM market size of 94.19 billion US dollars in 2021, an increase of 41.89% year-on-year.

However, the price performance of the two is contrary. Previously, when the author was affected by the pollution incident in The Armor and Western Digital production lines, the author learned that the pollution caused the two manufacturers to reduce production, so that the price increase of NAND Flash lasted for at least three months.

As part of the memory, although the market DRAM market size continues to grow, the price has suffered a roller coaster in 2021, and in recent times it has encountered a price winter.

According to the author's understanding, DRAM prices rose all the way in early 2021, soaring 41% in the first eight months, rising from an average sales price (ASP) of $3.37 in January to $4.77 in August.

However, it continued to fall after peaking in September last year, with DRAM ASP falling 3% to $4.62 throughout September, compared with an average decline of 7% in October, and the spot price of mainstream 8Gb and 16Gb DDR4 chips fell by 0.7-1.5% in November.

Source: wind

Wind data shows that as of March 31, DDR4 8Gb was quoted at $3.75 and DDR4 16Gb at $7.29, down again from the previous price.

The reason for this is that the market demand is cold, and the supply is greater than the actual demand. Some memory chip agents in Shenzhen revealed to the author that the overall market environment is not good, the domestic epidemic situation is repeated, foreign countries are still fighting, the market demand is very weak, Apple and domestic mobile phone factories are successively cutting orders, coupled with domestic manufacturers such as Hefei Changxin slowly rising, supply is greater than the actual demand. Now it is slowly falling, already a little upside down, do more and more.

According to the Electronic Times, the yield of the 17nm process stored by Changxin has initially reached 40%, and it is expected to gradually increase in later 2022. It plans to increase its monthly production to 60,000 to 80,000 12-inch wafers in the second half of 2022.

From the demand side, according to TrendForce Jibang Consulting estimates, the overall dram average price in the second quarter fell by about 0%-5%, due to the slightly higher inventory of buyers and sellers, coupled with the demand side such as PCs, laptops, smart phones, etc. affected by the recent Russian-Ukrainian conflict and qualcomm expansion, thereby weakening consumer purchasing power, currently only the server side is the main source of support memory demand, so the overall second quarter DRAM still has an oversupply situation.

From the supply side, Samsung and SK Hynix have gradually reduced production of DDR3, of which Samsung will no longer accept new DDR3 orders from 2023 and will complete all order deliveries by the end of 2023. Taiwan manufacturers such as South Asia Branch, Winbond Electronics, etc. will get transfer orders, in the context of steady demand, Korean manufacturers to reduce production, DDR3 prices in the second quarter are expected to rise, TrendForce expects DDR3 prices in the second quarter to rise 3% -8% ;DD R4 is still maintaining a downward trend.

DDR5 is grandly debuted and officially commercialized in the second half of the year

"DrAM decline will not be much, will not last long, the decline is actually within expectations, and now the DRAM price statistics on the market are not universal, because DRAM is now in an iterative period, DDR5 has begun to be large-scale from the fourth quarter of last year." Some fund researchers told the author.

According to the data, the first product of DDR5 was released by SK Hynix in October 2020, and the DDR5 memory module product was launched in Q4 of 2021. In the case of Jiahe Jinwei, the company's first RGBDDR5 game memory module was mass-produced on a small scale at the end of October last year, and began large-scale supply in November.

From the perspective of historical laws, each generation of DDR new standards need to be optimized for about 2 years after the release of the new standard, in order to achieve a more comprehensive and stable improvement in performance, so as to achieve market substitution for the previous generation of products. For example, according to the historical data of IC Insights, the first DDR4 products entered the market in 2014 and did not achieve a significant increase in market share until 2016.

According to this calculation, although the mainstream DRAM products in the market are still DDR4 series, Intel officially launched the 12th generation CPU in November last year, and DDR5 has begun to have a lot of shipments in the civilian field, but the price is slightly more expensive, and commercial has not yet begun to pull goods.

The above researcher told the author that the main application areas of DDR5 are still mobile phones and PCs, and data centers have not yet begun to be applied on a large scale. However, commercial is also very fast, Nvidia will officially launch H100 graphics card in the second half of this year; in addition, the Saphire rapids processor in the Intel server field will also be launched in the second half of the year, and support 8 channels of DDR5 memory.

It is reported that the NVIDIA H100 will use a new "Hopper" architecture, while the Hopper architecture is only designed for data centers and commercial systems. That is to say, the shipment of NVIDIA H100 is expected to drive the large-scale application of DDR5 in data centers, and with the current growth rate of global data centers, DDR5 may grow rapidly in the commercial field after the second half of the year.

At the beginning of the advent of DDR4, it was also in the commercial field to beat down the price, the process technology was more mature, and then rely on the field of civil consumer electronics to increase shipments.

Therefore, although DDR4 will be a mainstream product for some time to come, dram has opened a cycle of replacement, the era of DDR5 has arrived, and the capacity expansion of Samsung, Hynix and Micron is mainly focused on DDR5 new products.

Industry analysts pointed out that according to the periodicity of the previous DDR3 and DDR4, it is speculated that DDR5 products may bring an average price upward cycle of about 1 year to the DRAM industry.

(Proofreading/Arden)