Last night, Apple suddenly raised the prices of MacBook and iPad in multiple overseas markets. The overall increase was close to 20%. The reason for the price adjustment was the skyrocketing cost of memory and flash memory chips. This price increase has not yet covered the iPhone series. Apple issued a statement stating that it has never seen such a drastic price increase for a single component in a short period of time. Companies have been shouldering the cost pressure themselves for some time and tried not to let end consumers foot the bill. Now it is difficult to digest the cost pressure and can only increase the selling prices of many types of hardware.
It is worth noting that after Apple officially announced price increases for MacBook and iPad, stocks in the Asian Apple industry chain collectively experienced a sharp decline.
In the Korean market: SK Hynix, a major storage manufacturer, plunged 9.56% in early trading, and Samsung Electronics fell 8.65%. Both are core suppliers of Apple's DRAM memory and NAND flash memory; LG Electronics, which supplies camera modules to high-end iPhones, saw its stock price fall by 3.8% in early trading.
Japanese fruit chains are also under pressure: TDK, which supplies batteries for Apple devices, fell 8.2%; Murata Manufacturing Co., a leader in MLCC capacitors that Apple purchases in large quantities for hardware, fell 6.9%; Sony, which supplies mobile phone image sensors, closed slightly down by nearly 1%.
In China's A-share market, Apple's core foundry Luxshare Precision fell sharply at the opening. By the end of the day, its stock price fell by 9.18%, almost touching the limit.
In contrast, Taiwan Fruit Chain's performance is relatively stable. TSMC, the exclusive manufacturer of Apple's A-series and M-series processors, saw its stock price remain essentially unchanged; Foxconn, Apple's largest iPhone assembler, saw its stock price remain essentially unchanged.
In recent years, the large-scale production of AI data centers around the world has increased the market demand for high-bandwidth memory. The production capacity of memory and flash memory chips used in consumer electronics has been squeezed, resulting in tight supply and rising prices.
The collective decline of the Asian Apple industry chain also reflects the change in market capital trends: investors no longer simply pursue the chip dividends generated by AI, but are beginning to worry about the inflationary pressure on hardware costs brought about by rising storage prices.