Storage spot prices have increased more than 4 times this year, and mobile phone factory inventories have fallen to historical lows and will be forced to reduce allocations and increase prices.

According to the Financial Associated Press, the memory chip market is experiencing a rare "super price increase cycle." DRAM particles have increased more than 4 times this year, and Flash prices have nearly tripled.As the demand for AI servers occupies production capacity, the supply of consumer-grade storage continues to shrink, and downstream terminal manufacturers are trapped in the dilemma of passive replenishment of low inventory. In the future, consumer electronics will have a market pattern of "higher prices and smaller capacity".

According to Kusai Intelligence, the spot price of 4GB DDR4x particles rose from US$7 at the beginning of the year to more than US$30 in mid-November, an increase of 4-5 times; the price of 64GB eMMC increased from US$3.2 to more than US$8, and the overall price of Flash products increased by nearly three times.

In early November, SanDisk announced a 50% price increase, and some Samsung products followed suit with a price increase of over 60%. The sharp price increase in a short period of time exceeded industry expectations.

Micron even announced the termination of the memory and SSD business of its consumer brand Crucial, focusing its resources on the high-growth data center field driven by AI, and fully attacking high-profit AI storage.

This has also led to the current storage inventory level of smartphone manufacturers generally being below 4 weeks, which is far lower than the healthy level of 8-10 weeks.

Analysts said that this is not because mobile phone manufacturers are actively destocking, but because demand expectations at the beginning of the year were conservative and they did not replenish their stocks in time. Moreover, the current spot price is too high and supply is in short supply, so they can only passively accept high prices to replenish their stocks.

In the future, some mainstream configurations of mobile phones may shift from 12GB+512GB to 8GB/12GB+256GB, ending the previous trend of continuous doubling of storage capacity. At the same time, price increases are also an inevitable option.

Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, previously publicly stated in an earnings conference call that the surge in memory costs has reached a point where "increasing mobile phone prices cannot fully offset it." It is expected that product retail prices may rise significantly next year.