According to investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, quote trends for various products, including commodity DRAM, server DRAM and consumer DRAM, fell by nearly 30%, with the exception of discrete mobile DRAM/ eMCP products, whose declines fell within the 10-20% range. Server DRAM prices suffered the steepest fall, registering a near-35% decline. Observing the market, we see that although 2Q sales bit grew over the previous quarter, quotes kept on falling, causing total DRAM revenue to fall by 9.1% QoQ in 2Q.
According to the latest notebook shipments report by TrendForce, concerns over the US-China trade dispute and the Intel CPU shortage originally casted a conservative cloud over the overall outlook for market in 2Q19. Yet three factors played a role in pushing 2Q shipments to 41.5 million units to give an expectation-exceeding QoQ growth of 12.1%: (1) AMD CPUs are being substituted for Intel CPUs; (2) Chromebooks find increased demand in the form of tenders; and (3) worries arising from the trade dispute moved brands to stock up anticipatorily.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, has just released contract prices for various products in July, in which we see contract prices still trending down overall, but those for mainstream products shrinking due to the Toshiba outage directly impacting production. Furthermore, Japan's modifications to South Korean-bound export regulations were also anticipated by the market to impact South Korea's NAND Flash supply. TrendForce suggests that Japan's move was merely the removal of South Korea from its white list, in which countries to receive favorable treatment were listed and with South Korea as the only Asian country listed in the past. South Korea will merely turn from a country receiving special treatment into a normal one, and South Korean semiconductor suppliers will have to go through the same proceedings as other Asian countries do. And since the Japanese government has already assigned additional personnel to speed up reviewing, this move probably won't be causing much of an impact.
Thanks to China's new point-based quota system for new energy vehicles and the enlarging scale of European, American and Japanese markets, opportunities in the HEV market have attracted much interest. EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce, predicts that global HEV market share will reach 5% in 2019, whereas that for pure electric vehicles will stand at only 2%.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, finds that although spot prices have increased by 24% on average since the start of July, the scale of the spot market is too small to relieve suppliers of their high inventory levels by any noticeable amount. Furthermore, end demand for memory products saw no improvement entering peak-season, putting contract prices on the slide yet again. Contract prices for market mainstream DDR4 8GB products have come to US$25.5, a 10.5% decline MoM from US$28.5.
