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[News] Price Talks Every Week! Western Digital Notifies Customers of Weekly Price Adjustments
Memory prices continue to rise, with the world’s top five memory chip manufacturers, including Western Digital (WDC), notifying their distributors and consumer customers on December 5th that they will shorten the quoting period for their two major products – HDD and NAND Flash memory. Instead, they will adopt a pricing strategy of periodic adjustments to cope with the rapidly changing storage market.
Despite the traditional peak season of the tech industry nearing its end, memory industry insiders indicate that the off-season is not slack. WDC predicts a lively scenario of “weekly increases” in quotations, potentially prompting OEM customers to place orders earlier.
This trend is advantageous for raising both spot prices and contract prices for memory in the first quarter of the coming year.
The content of the letter sent by WDC to its channel customers is as follows:
“HDD – We will continue to review pricing on a weekly basis, with increases expected through the first half of next year.
Flash – We anticipate periodic price increases over the next few quarters, with the cumulative increase likely surpassing 55% of current levels.”
We have aligned our production capacity to the current demand environment, so our ability to respond to unplanned demand and orders is limited. Please ensure any changes to your orders are communicated as early as possible. Anticipate extended lead times for any unplanned demand.
According to industry sources in the memory sector, the letter from WDC primarily serves as a notice to OEM customers related to its two major product lines, HDD and NAND Flash. Due to major international memory manufacturers actively reducing production and controlling capacity to maintain prices, this has led to a significant rebound in NAND prices.
In recent times, both spot and contract prices have shown an upward trend, and HDD prices have been on the rise since the second half of this year.
Based on TrendForce’s data, WDC has benefited from the recovery in demand in the consumer electronics sector. The increase in NAND bit shipments in the third quarter has driven revenue upward, reaching USD 1.556 billion in the third quarter, showing a 13% quarterly increase.
The original plan for WDC was to merge with Japanese counterpart Kioxia, but after negotiations fell through in October, it was announced that WDC would be split into two publicly listed companies.
According to foreign reports, WDC has previously issued a statement announcing the spin-off of its flash memory business. Reportedly, the separated business will focus on memory for computers, devices, and portable hard drives, while the HDD business will concentrate on selling large-capacity memory to cloud data centers.
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(Photo credit: WDC)
