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Hardware

What's Causing the Memory Price Hike? 31

Posted by Cliff from the inflation-or-market-greed? dept.
Trazom28 asks: "Anyone else noticed how much memory prices have jumped in the last few months? For example, back in early summer, I purchased a 128 meg stick of PC100 for around $100 from Micro Trends. It's been on a steady increase the last few months, and today, it goes for $182. So.. anyone else heard of why, or is this artifical market inflation? "
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What's Causing the Memory Price Hike? More

What's Causing the Memory Price Hike?

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  • I'm curious, is this in a machine that is overclocked at all? And which OS are you using? In my past experience, cheap ram in overclocked machines is not a good combo.
  • A friend of mine was purchasing memory from a mail-order company in the UK. He was told that the reason for the price change was that one of the major manufacturers had gone bust! I'm affraid I don't know any more details but it's a start.

    Manic.

  • .....is that it's getting close to Christmas again. September onwards is traditionally a bad time to be buying PC hardware.

    I'm more inclined to believe that than another permutation of the "chip factory fire" line, at any rate. ;)

    --
    This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.

  • Originally I had heard (from customer service reps at www.mwave.com ) that rummors about a shortage of memory had artificially inflated memory prices. Whether or not this "shortage" ever materialized is beyond me. All I know is that I am kicking myself for not ordering that 128 MB PC100 Corsair DIMM when it was $115 (US). Now it's over $170 (US).
  • Actually, I just checked mwave.com and their Corsair memory prices have sky rocketed. a PC100 CAS2 DIMM (128 MB) is now over $260 (US) !!! What the heck? Has anyone else seen this sort of jump in the past couple of days?


  • Asia Pac Economic Turnaround (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Remember last year when the far east economies crashed? Korea etc. had big currency devaluations etc.? When this happened demand for many commodities like oil, RAM etc. took a nose dive. Far eastern countries ramped up everything they could export to get foreign exchange to rebuild their economies via a favorable trade balance. Since they needed to, they ran up RAM production to the max, and sold it for a song. Well folks, now the far east is making an economic comeback. Now they have local demand for RAM, the US ecomony is doing great, and Europe is starting to come back. The result is going to be that they can't make enough RAM to satisfy demand, so the price is going up. Other commodities are starting to increase in price, too.

    We have had an unusal period of low inflation and low interest rates in part caused by low commodity prices and low cost of imported goods. The fact of the matter is that this siuation is not going to last, and one of the first places that you are seeing the change is in RAM prices.

  • An even further update. This was posted at Anandtech today:


    http://www.anandtech.com/#2907 [anandtech.com].


    Read the middle paragraph.

  • The taiwanese companies who build the actual chips are raising prices substantially. Reminiscent of OPEC once they had a virtual oligopoly. Don't monopolies/oligopolies suck?
  • Check out the stories at The Register [theregister.co.uk] which has been commenting on memory prices recently.

    From an article yesterday:
    The announcement came as world 64Mb DRAM prices today reached their highest ever levels. According to Asiabiztech.com, these chips were today selling at $12.75 per unit.

    This compares to prices around the $5 mark in July.

    Joe D'Elia, senior microprocessor analyst at Dataquest, said: "We are now seeing the difference between a buyer's and a seller's market.

    "Everyone has kept stocks to an absolute minimum."

    He also pointed out the huge difference between contract pricing -- which stands at around $7 -- and spot pricing for 64Mb DRAM.

    To explain the sudden memory price rises, D'Elia added: "There is a lot of uncertainty in the market at the moment - surrounding technology such as Rambus. The manufacturers are capitalising on that."

    Tim

  • Exactly two months ago I was going to buy 2 128MB Generic DIMMS, for $53 each! Now they're close to $200, that's four times the price!!
  • Almost certainly this is nothing more than all the vendors raising prices. Prices tend to go up around summertime and stay there through the Christmas buying season. They'll go down again after the new year and after everyone gets done buying the computer stuff they didn't get for xmas.

    -=-=-=-=-

  • Now places like The Chip Merchant [thechipmerchant.com] are charging $224 for a PC100 CAS2-latency 128MB SDRAM DIMM, and that's non-parity! Prices have jumped 30%, from around $170 a few days ago! And 512MB of PC150 (that's CAS2 latency @ 133MHz, or CAS3 latency at 150MHz) error-checking SDRAM will now cost over $1000 from STEP ThermoDynamics [step-thermodynamics.com], at $270 per 128MB DIMM! And I can't wait until January next year to buy :( Maybe I'll buy some of it now, and the rest later. I wonder if speculation is also causing this price hike; maybe people are buying up tons of memory for some oddball reasons related to the millennium?
  • Its my understanding that last summer thru this year, the companies that produce RAM created WAY too much, and had like 2 or 3 years of over stock. So some companies went out of business from the sudden deflation in RAM prices, due to over supply under demand (basic econ). Now quantities are reaching nominal levels, but with the decreased competition, and rising demand we are seeing ram prices climb back upto and over their expected price points.

    Prices are ridiculous right now, but they should come back down like everything else does. I just hope it happens sooner then latter.

    Crossing my fingers, and guarding my corsair 128mb sticks,
    Ecc
  • New laws have been passed, meaning that the excess Ram produced can't simply be "dumped". Fine! You think, we now have an excess of ram... Wrong!

    In the past, as opposed to dumping, excess has been sold on VERY cheaply to smaller vendors, these vendors then sell via .net or magazines, undercutting the larger, traditional vendors. This in turn causes the larger vendors to pull down their prices, the little guys respond... and so on.

    Now with memory being much less in abundance, prices have started to rise again, and the little guys are right in saying there is a "shortage". The big guys however, maintain their current levels, and charge what they would have done anyway, if the "little guys" hadn't gotten in on the act.

    Good News for the environment, not so good for upgraders...

    Mong.
    * Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
  • are not conspiracy theories what /. is famous for? :)

    or maybe that's what _they_ want you to believe?

    Even if prices where at $260 a year ago, was that price inflated also? If this is a trend where manufacts raise the price pre-christmas season wouldn't the price of $260 a year ago be a reflection of this also? I'd be curious to see what DIMM prices where in say May or April of 1998.
  • a trusted vendor i deal with frequently told me that the price increase (almost double) is because of a chip shortage and korean (primarily) chip manufacturers have drastically decreased their production volume, obviously. the prices should be coming back down to normal, or reasonable, as soon as the end of this month.

    i was able to get some 128MB PC100 modules for $139 from BestBuy in Wisconson but no luck finding any information on the website, hence no link. contacts baby!!
  • The obscene part about memory prices is the fact that two chips of lower density have become cheaper than one chip of higher density. Back in the SIMM days, denser chips cost less per MB, simply because you were buying more, and the manufacture costs were nominally lower.

    This was true even in 1995, when the price for the kind of RAM most people needed (30 pin 1MB SIMMs) was about $40 apiece. The reason for that, I was told, was because "The factory that made epoxy for *every* memory manufacturer was destroyed in the Kobe earthquake.", but you may have heard another B.S. excuse. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now.

    Of course, there is one thing that is similar to 1995 -- Microsoft is set to release another bloated hog of an operating system in the next couple of months. If history repeats itself, look for a steep drop when memory manufacturers find out that people simply *won't* pay obscene amounts of money for memory, even if it does slow the OS...

  • I've found when school starts up people going back to tend to buy a computer. This dirves up the price of memory and other things. It stays up for the x-mass season, then it will die again. This has happend the last 4 years I've been in school.

    However, it usually doesn't go up this much. So dunno.

    If you act now you can run out to Best Buy or some such store and get a rain check before they 'update' their prices. The reason you'll need a rain check is because they were out of ALL their memory. But, I got a raincheck for 2 sticks of 128megs of pc100 for $90/stick.
  • Prices have certainly taken a hike in the UK as well. PC100 128MB DIMMS were going for around £105 (~US$170) (ex-VAT) back in June, and are now at around £150 (~US$240).

    If they're still $170 in the US, maybe it is time to emigrate....

    Which brings up another point - why are electrical goods so much more expensive in Europe?

    --
    This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
  • Traditionally you expect electronics to go down in price as they get obsolete but today the trend is upwards in price due to skyrocketing labor costs and stagnating productivity. Who knows if the same trend is going to affect Camcorders, VCRs, cell phones and other electronics. Thank God I got a 128 Meg DRAM in July for $90 instead of waiting.
  • I agree that maybe the RAM manufactors are speculating in the new windows realease, and that the price probebly won't go down again before, say, late january...

    But i don't think it'll last for long thou, because soon the new ram technology's will make the manufactors massproduce those chips and PC-100 and PC-133 will end up as EDO ram did... that's pretty expensive these days... At least in Norway.. :|

    Other reasons for the prices to raise is, rumors, the new Windows realease witch will eat ram and the fact that it's lots of peoples will buy computers for Xmas.

    Sorry for my bad english..
    Mvh
    --
    Magnus
  • Unlike most PC components, whose prices tend to go down, down, down, RAM has tended to fluctuate quite a bit. There may be various reasons for this, all based on supply and demand.

    Around 1988, for instance, an embargo caused memory prices to triple in a short time. There have been a couple of times in the nineties where the price has spiked. The often-repeated story was that there was a memory plant fire or explosion. I don't know how true that was.
  • Now costs $240 at the same store. Holy shit.
  • After talking with a few places that sell today, it seems that some of the suppliers, mainly Micron, are holding back the RAM to raise the prices. As of today a 128MB stick of Micron was ~230 and they said it was expected to rise another 100 bucks!
  • According a swedish retailer the capsul manufackturers (Samsung etc) has stopped selling them to third parties so prices go up.
  • I don't know about $53 RAM, but I got a stick of 128 MB PC100 for $76. No problems with it, been using it almost nonstop for over a month.

    The proof is not in the pudding, it is right here:
    http://www.world-domination.net/proof.ht ml [world-domination.net]

    SupremeOverlord
  • I think you should be glad you didn't. For $53 either the person selling doesn't know how to price things properly or it was really really cheap (not inexpensive) RAM. I wouldn't trust $53, 128 MB DIMMS.


  • Actually, let's discard all the conspiracy theories and talk about some facts:
    1) There are 5 major fabs making over 90% of the 64 Mbit SDRAM chips.
    2) 2 of the 5 closed for about a month to re-tool/install new fabrication equipment. Reason is they are going to a smaller process, and newer equipment.
    3) The temporary closures resulted in the supply being reduced by about 20%.
    4) The industry tends, when faced with any form of shortage, temporary or otherwise, to panic.
    5) The industry likes to feed this panic. Let's say you have an inventory worth $1 Million dollars. Let's say prices go up 50%. Then you make a 50% profit.
    The new lines go full production by the end of September, then normal market forces of competition will go into effect and prices will drop again.
    Last note:
    A 128MB PC100 SDRAM DIMM cost about $260 a year ago. The lowest it got this year was about $90 The price is now where it was at one year ago.

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