Market sources said that memory chip suppliers will adjust their inventories in the second half of this year, but it is expected that their inventories will return to a healthy state in the first half of 2023. Downstream customers of chip suppliers continue to be reluctant to stock because prices are expected to fall further. Compared with July, the spot price of memory fell more sharply in August. The prices of DDR4 and DDR3 fell by more than 10% in August alone.

Market sources said that memory chip suppliers will adjust their inventories in the second half of this year, but it is expected that their inventories will return to a healthy state in the first half of 2023. Downstream customers of chip suppliers continue to be reluctant to stock because prices are expected to fall further. Compared with July, the spot price of memory fell more sharply in August. The prices of DDR4 and DDR3 fell by more than 10% in August alone.

The source pointed out that due to the slow progress of PC manufacturers' inventory adjustment, the decline of commodity DDR4 chip prices showed no signs of slowing down in August. In August alone, the spot price of 8Gb DDR4 chips fell by 11-14%, while the price of 16Gb DDR4 chips also fell by about 10%.

The source said that the price of DDR3 fell by about 14% in August, following a drop of about 7% in July.

The source said that the contract price decline of DRAM and NAND flash memory in the third quarter is expected to expand. Consumer DRAM prices are expected to fall 13-18% in the third quarter.

The source said that the contract price of DRAM and NAND flash memory is expected to fall by the end of 2022. If suppliers are still unwilling to cut production, prices may continue to decline in the first quarter of 2023.

Inventory of memory manufacturers in 2022: hit a 10-year high

In 2021, the world shipped 1.15 trillion chips. The global "core shortage" in the past two years has enabled many chip manufacturers to continuously expand production and increase energy.

At the beginning of this year, Intel announced the construction of two new chip factories in Ohio, the United States, with an initial investment of more than 20 billion dollars. It is expected to start construction this year and put into production by the end of 2025. This made the residents living here for generations feel very sad, because they had to sell their houses to Intel factories.

On August 8, semiconductor manufacturer Gexin and Qualcomm announced that they would extend the existing strategic global long-term semiconductor manufacturing agreement to 2028, and the total procurement would increase to 7.4 billion dollars.

On August 9, Micron announced that it would invest 40 billion dollars in memory chip manufacturing by 2030. Meguiar Light said that in the next 10 years, the investment will increase the global market share of American memory chip capacity from less than 2% to 10%.

At the end of July, SK Group, the parent company of SK Hynix, a Korean memory chip giant, planned to increase its investment in the United States by 22 billion dollars, covering semiconductor, power battery, biotechnology and other fields.

Liu Xingliang, a member of the Information and Communication Economic Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, pointed out that according to incomplete statistics, from 2020 to 2024, a total of 25 8-inch and 60 12 inch wafers will be built, with a total investment of nearly one trillion yuan. By then, the global 8-inch wafer production capacity will be increased by nearly 20%, and the 12 inch production capacity will be increased by nearly 50%.

Corresponding to the capacity is the continuous increase of inventory level. Taking nearly 2350 chip related listed manufacturing companies around the world as the target, the amount of inventory in the first quarter of 2022 is about 97 billion dollars more than that at the end of 2021, and both the surplus and the increase of inventory are at a 10-year high.