The major memory manufacturers have made a lot of profits in the last year, the price of memories keeps rising and they return to prices that seemed forgotten. The sale of die has increased profits by 5.4%, while that of DRAMs has risen from 3 to 6%. VRAMs have reached price peaks, with manufacturers’ profits up 15%.
The current price trend for graphics card memory can cloud the slow but steady decline in GPU prices. While demand from the mining world is falling and causing graphics to return to the shelves of stores, the rising price of memory drives up the price of GPUs directly. Unfortunately, a further increase in the price of memories is expected in the second quarter of 2018.
Profits rose by only 5.4% in the first quarter of 2018, mainly due to the low sales of smartphones. Many new launches are produced at this time and shipped to stores in the summer, which will increase demand by the end of the second quarter.
95.5% of the memory market is divided between three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, which do not compete with the price of the memories. Samsung has achieved 69% profit, followed by 61% for SK Hynix and 58% for Micron. These companies are being investigated for the latest increases in the price of memories, to check that there is a justification.
Graphics cards are affected
The price of RAM memory keeps going up, which directly affects the cost/GB. If you look at the 4GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR4-2133 memory, it now costs 55 euros, up from 40 euros in November 2017.
Currently, RAM is one of the most expensive components of a computer. Today, DDR4-2666 memories are supported by all modern platforms and placing 16 GB of RAM on our motherboard can cost us about 150 euros (at least). Which makes it cost us almost 10 euros a GB of RAM, impressive.
This leads many users to hold on with their current RAM and not to upgrade, and hope that with the new generation the prices will be reduced.