A few days ago, Samsung released a first-quarter performance forecast, with an operating profit of 6.6 trillion won (about 35.4 billion yuan) in the first quarter, an increase of 931%, which is a 10-fold increase.
Why can Samsung's profits grow so sharply? Of course, it is because memory chips have risen sharply, and Samsung, as the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, has won nearly 40% of the world's memory chip share.
At the end of 2023, the price of memory chips began to rise, and in the first quarter of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023, the price increased by at least 30%, so Samsung's operating profit rose by 931%.
In fact, this is just the beginning, Samsung will continue to raise prices, according to Korean media reports, Samsung plans to raise the price of enterprise-level SSDs in the second quarter of this year by 20%-25% on the basis of the price in the first quarter.
Under the leadership of Samsung, other memory chip manufacturers are not willing to be lonely, and they are also following the price increase. Taiwan media said that Micron has proposed to most customers that it plans to increase the price of DRAM and SSD products by more than 25% in the second quarter.
The same is true for SK hynix, which plans to increase the price of DRAM and SSD products by more than 20% in the quarter. There are also Western Digital and Kioxia are similar, and they will also increase in price in the second quarter.
On the one hand, with the recovery of mobile phones and PCs, as well as the explosion of AI, everyone's demand for storage products has increased.
In addition, there will be too many losses in 2023, and only the memory chips of the three giants, Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, may exceed about 150 billion yuan in 2023, and they are in urgent need of recovery.
Memory chips are originally cyclical, everyone is on the upside when the price rises, make more money, and then when the price goes down, and then lose money, now the memory chip has begun to rise, of course, the price has to rise to make money.
After all, China is the world's largest consumer of chips and an importer, and China imports more than $100 billion of memory chips every year, accounting for more than 50% of the scale of all memory chips.
If the price rises by 30%, China will have to pay an additional $30 billion in imports, and if the price increases by 50%, it will have to pay an additional $50 billion. It can be seen that domestic memory chips really need to be refueled, the current share is only about 5%, too bad, only efforts to improve the self-sufficiency rate, reduce imports, in order to really reduce dependence, save foreign exchange, what do you think?