Samsung announced its results some time ago, saying that its operating profit increased by 931% in the first quarter, a figure that really stunned the industry. Why Samsung's profits have risen so sharply, the main reason is that the price of memory chips has risen sharply, and profits have increased significantly.
In fact, not only Samsung, but also Micron, SK hynix, Kioxia, and Western Digital, the performance in the first quarter was very good, because everyone's memory chips have increased in price, and revenue and profits have increased. And in the next two quarters, these major memory chip manufacturers said that they will increase prices by about 20-25%, and presumably the next performance will be even better.
Who is the loser of these memory chip manufacturers who will suffer from the big price increases? Of course, it is the Chinese market.
According to the data, the global DRAM+NAND market size will be about 120 billion US dollars in 2023, and of this 120 billion US dollars, China will import about 90 billion US dollars, accounting for 75%.
If the price of DRAM and DRAM rises by 50% in 2024, the amount of memory chips we import will rise by 45 billion US dollars, equivalent to 330 billion yuan.
The reason is that our domestic production rate is too low, and there is a gap of more than 10 times between the production capacity that the two major domestic memory chip manufacturers can provide and the actual domestic demand.
If you don't believe it, it's clear if you take a look at the data, let's talk about DRAM memory chips first, taking the data of 2023Q4 as an example, the top 5 manufacturers account for 98.9% of the share, and the domestic Changxin is in the other, with a share of less than 1.1%.
Looking at the NAND flash memory situation, taking the data of Q4 in 2023 as an example, the top 5 manufacturers account for 94.2% of the share, and the domestic Yangtze River Storage is also considered to be the other, with a share of less than 5.8%.
Based on the DRAM+NAND market data, we can basically believe that the global DRAM+NAND market share of the two major domestic manufacturers, Changcun + Changxin, does not exceed 5%, which is about 5%.
And our actual demand for DRAM+NAND production capacity accounts for about 75% of the world's total, 5% is production capacity, and 75% is demand, is there a 14-fold gap between the two?
It can be seen that there is still a lot of room for development of our memory chips, not to mention going overseas to grab the market of other manufacturers, as long as the domestic demand can be met, it is also a great performance.
The reason is that China is the world's manufacturing base for electronic products, and more than 70 percent of mobile phones, more than 80 percent of computers, as well as various handheld game consoles, televisions and other digital products are made in China, which requires a large number of memory chips.
However, we should also note that although there are so many imports, it does not mean that they are all consumed in the Chinese market, and many of them are manufactured into finished products and exported to the world.
And these export products, maybe customers will specify the use of certain storage products, so it is unlikely that 100% will not be imported, but the huge space is certain, considering that the United States is still suppressing domestic memory chips and wants to block our progress, so the situation is still quite grim.