Compared against the average of the January to March period, prices of lithium batteries for IT devices have already risen by more than 15%, reports EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce. The price trend of IT batteries started to turn in the fourth quarter of 2016, when the global cobalt market saw rising prices and China placed greater restriction on the domestic mining of cobalt ores. In the February and March of this year, the cobalt market saw another huge price jump. As a result, the price trend of IT batteries changed from a gradual climb to a sharp upswing.
Global shipments of enterprise-grade SSDs for the first quarter of 2017 grew against seasonal headwinds by 3~4% compared with the prior quarter to reach around 6 million units, says DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce. For the same quarter, enterprise-grade SSDs also represented more than 10% of the total SSD product shipments worldwide. Currently, U.S.-based Google, Facebook and Microsoft and China’s Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent all have voracious appetite for server systems as they are providing their services via their growing network of data centers. These companies therefore are contributing substantially to the global demand for enterprise-grade SSDs.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, reports that the global mobile DRAM revenue for the first quarter of 2017 dropped slightly by 1.7% compared with the prior quarter. The smartphone market in the first quarter went through the conventional off season in the first quarter with the global device production volume declined by 23% from last year’s fourth quarter. On other hand, contract prices of mobile DRAM have kept climbing. These counteracting factors resulted in a small dip in the total mobile DRAM revenue.