Apple said on its latest quarterly earnings call that the company was already feeling pressure from rising memory costs in the quarter ending in March, and that this pressure will intensify in the June quarter and beyond. CEO Tim Cook bluntly stated in a Q&A with analysts that Apple expects to face "significantly higher memory costs" in the June quarter, and that after June, rising memory prices will have an "increasing impact" on Apple's business.
Cook revealed that the reason why there has been no significant change in product pricing is largely due to the large amount of memory inventory that Apple has previously accumulated. These "carryover inventories" have provided the company with a certain buffer space in the past few quarters, partially hedging the soaring costs of the supply chain. In the past March quarter, memory costs have had a more obvious impact on the company's profit margins, but inventory digestion still helped Apple suppress the speed of cost transmission in the short term. However, as existing inventory is gradually depleted, this "cushion" effect will be unsustainable, and Apple's future cost and price trade-offs are becoming more acute.
Currently, the entire consumer technology industry is bearing the impact of rising memory prices. The root cause is that global memory supply is severely squeezed by the demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure construction. From servers to data centers, large-capacity memory for AI training and inference clusters has become a priority for chip manufacturers, while consumer-grade equipment has been pushed to the back of the supply chain, triggering widespread cost inflation. There have been cases in the industry where many PC manufacturers have significantly increased the prices of models equipped with high-capacity memory and solid-state drives, which is regarded as a precursor to this round of "memory inflation." In the past few quarters, Apple has relied on its size advantage and inventory strategy to temporarily maintain relatively stable terminal pricing. However, Cook's latest statement shows that this "isolation effect" cannot continue indefinitely.
Cook pointed out during the conference call that the impact of memory prices on the company's performance in the December quarter last year was still limited. At that time, Apple had predicted that pressure would increase significantly in the March quarter, and now this concern has been realized. For the upcoming June quarter, Apple management also gave a judgment of "significant impact but still inventory hedging": memory costs will continue to rise, but the company can still rely on carryover inventory to a certain extent to weaken the short-term impact. The real uncertainty comes from the time window after June - when the inventory buffer gradually disappears, Apple needs to re-find a balance between product configuration, supply chain negotiations and pricing strategy.
On the issue of how to deal with soaring memory costs, Cook emphasized that Apple is "continuously evaluating the situation" and has "a range of options to choose from," but he did not disclose any specific measures or roadmap. This means that in subsequent product cycles, Apple may adjust the memory capacity combination of different models, optimize the cost structure, or use the profitability of other businesses to offset some of the hardware cost pressure. Judging from the current information, Apple is still trying to delay the transmission of rising memory costs to consumers as much as possible without directly raising the terminal selling price. However, in the context of continued high demand for global AI infrastructure and tight memory supply, there is still a lot of suspense about how long this strategy can be maintained.