Last month the news broke that both WesternDigital What Toshiba had suffered contamination problems at their flash memory product factories in Japan, causing a large number of products from both manufacturers to spoil. After knowing this fact, we users already feared that the RAM and SSD prices were going to skyrocket, something that was increased by the recent earthquake in the Japanese country, but the reality is that due to other circumstances, a price increase is not expected, or if it does occur, that the difference is minimal. We tell you why below.
Every time a disaster or accident occurs in hardware product factories, we users throw our hands in our heads, fearing the worst. And it is a situation that we have already experienced several times over the last few years, and we just have to remember the well-known “hard drive crisis” due to the floods that took place in Thailand in 2011, or the blackouts that Samsung suffered in its factories a few weeks ago. However, it seems that this time things look quite different.
The price of RAM and SSDs will not go up anytime soon
After quite atypical weeks, in which the war in Russia and Ukraine is taking over all the news but at the same time we are seeing the transport strike, the earthquake in Japan and the contamination of the WD and Toshiba factories, everything pointed because the price of devices based on flash memory could skyrocket, and we already feared that we were going to have to pay a lot more if we wanted to buy RAM or SSD memory.
However, this expected price increase has not taken place, and market analysts say it is because the pc industry is experiencing a major slowdown right now; In other words, despite the fact that manufacturers have suffered an impact on their inventories, since the demand for components is lower, there is no reason for a price rise.
Since the pandemic broke out COVID-19, telecommuting was established to stay in many cases, something that caused a great growth in the PC industry because many people needed to renew their equipment or buy new ones, causing the demand to increase considerably. However, that was more than two years ago and today people already have their updated or relatively new PCs and don’t need to buy any more, which is why demand has slowed down a lot.
“The drop in PC demand has also directly affected memory chips.” says Zhan Jiahong, a semiconductor industry analyst at Morgan. “Flash memory is expected to see a price rebound of less than 5%, well below previous expectations of a rise of more than 10%.”
With these forecasts in hand, a rise of 5% is so insignificant that it could even be absorbed by the manufacturers themselves or even the stores, so the price we will pay to buy RAM and/or SSD should not suffer practically at all.