The memory shortage may persist until 2030, and the share prices of SK Hynix, Micron and other related enterprises have slumped across the board.

On November 4, market sources reported that the industry forecasts the memory shortage will last from 2029 to 2030, and the BOM (Bill of Materials) procurement prices for various mobile phone manufacturers continue to rise.

The U.S. stock market storage sector weakened across the board that day, with obvious selling pressure from capital. Micron Technology fell 7%, SanDisk fell 7.91%, Western Digital fell 6.77%, Seagate Technology fell 8.13%, SK Hynix fell 5.12%, and Kioxia ADR fell 5.38%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped by more than 3%, among which SanDisk and Seagate Technology led the declines.

On November 5, South Korea's KOSPI index fell by more than 5%, closing at 5386.29 points as of press time. Among them, SK Hynix dropped more than 9%, and Samsung Electronics fell more than 6%.

In fact, major storage manufacturers including SK Hynix and Samsung have issued multiple warnings about the duration of the memory shortage wave previously.

On October 28, SK Hynix stated that due to factors such as the increased technical difficulty of advanced process manufacturing and the long time required to build new production facilities, the supply shortage pattern in the storage market is expected to continue until 2030. The company plans to accelerate production expansion, expecting that in the fourth quarter, HBM4 will surpass HBM3E in both shipment volume and revenue; it also plans to raise the proportion of 321-layer NAND process in its domestic production capacity in South Korea to over 50%, to increase the supply of high-performance, large-capacity enterprise-level solid-state drives.

In March this year, Chey Tae-won, Chairman of the SK Group, also stated that due to systematic bottlenecks in semiconductor production, the global memory chip shortage may last for another four to five years.

At present, the production capacity of major storage manufacturers including SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron and Kioxia for next year has all been sold out. Kwak Noh-Jung, CEO of SK Hynix, revealed at the 2026 Q3 earnings conference: "The already finalized LTA (Long-Term Agreement) orders, superimposed on the demands currently under negotiation with customers, mean that our DRAM and HBM production capacity for the next three years up to 2029 has actually been almost fully sold out. The orders under negotiation are all based on clear procurement plans from customers, with a very high probability of being finalized. Overall, the visibility of medium and long-term sales has been greatly improved."

Samsung Electronics also clearly stated at its Q3 earnings call that its HBM production capacity for 2027 has been sold out at the set target price, and the overall DRAM memory supply in 2028 will remain tight.

Samsung's memory business has signed LTAs with 10 customers and is in negotiations with another 10 for multi-year contracts. As users interested in this agreement form expand to the mobile, automotive and networking sectors, Samsung is steadily advancing its plan to lock in 60%-70% of its output through multi-year contracts.

Yoshihiko Kawamura, Executive Vice President of Kioxia Holdings, previously stated publicly that all of Kioxia's chip production capacity quotas for 2027 have been basically allocated, and the overall status is completely sold out. Even more than 50% of the 2028 production capacity quotas have been locked, all available production capacity the enterprise can offer has been locked in advance by downstream customers, and the demand across the entire storage market is extremely strong at present.

Micron is in a similar situation, with long-term forward agreement orders covering several years later. Leading cloud vendors, AI enterprises and consumer electronics brands are actively signing multi-year supply agreements to lock in production capacity and avoid subsequent price increase risks. The previous model where manufacturers negotiated prices on a quarterly or semi-annual basis is becoming invalid, and LTA has become the mainstream transaction method in the industry.

However, the memory shortage inevitably brings huge cost pressure to terminal manufacturers, including Apple, which has extremely strong bargaining power in spare parts procurement. At Apple's recent Q4 earnings call, the new CEO used the word "unprecedented" to describe this phenomenon, stating that Apple will face higher memory costs in the first fiscal quarter of fiscal year 2027.

According to the CEO's introduction, Apple has adjusted the prices of Mac, iPad and iPhone in June and September this year to hedge against costs, but looking ahead, memory procurement prices will continue to rise. To guarantee supply, Apple increased its manufacturing procurement commitments by 33 billion U.S. dollars from June to September. At the same time, the cloud cost of Siri AI is included in the service cost, and hardware revenue is deferred and amortized.

In the consumer PC market, many brands no longer equip their new thin and light laptops and gaming laptops with large-capacity memory as standard, the basic memory capacity of models at the same price range is lowered, and the premium for high-memory versions has increased significantly. In the smartphone sector, LPDDR memory quotas remain tight, the stock of large-capacity versions of Android flagship models is tightened, some models have tight supply in the early stage of launch, and the phenomenon of price increases at the channel end is on the rise.

Vehicle-mounted terminals and industrial control equipment cannot stay unaffected either. The delivery cycle of automotive-grade DRAM and NAND has been extended, car manufacturers and industrial control manufacturers are forced to extend the material stocking cycle, and delivery delays have occurred in some projects.

Many terminal brands are caught in a dilemma: absorbing the price increase on their own will squeeze their already meager profits, while directly raising product prices will weaken the competitiveness of their products in the market and divert price-sensitive users. Many design teams have begun to adjust their solutions, using software optimization methods such as memory partition scheduling and storage compression algorithms to maintain the user experience without increasing hardware capacity, so as to hedge against the rise in BOM costs. Tracking data from TrendForce shows that the proportion of memory material costs for many PC and server manufacturers has risen from about 15% in earlier years to around 30%.

In the pattern where the three major global original manufacturers have locked in forward production capacity and maintained strong quotations, domestic storage manufacturer Changxin Technology is in a special industrial position. In September this year, Changxin announced that its fifth-generation DRAM technology platform has achieved mass production, and simultaneously launched large-capacity LPDDR5X products, with its process node entering the world's first tier, becoming an important incremental variable in the global DRAM supply system.

Benefiting from the global DRAM supply shortage and rising product prices, Changxin Technology's revenue in the first half of the year increased significantly year-on-year and successfully turned a loss into profit. The release of domestic DRAM production capacity provides an alternative channel for domestic terminal brands' BOM procurement.

Regarding the future price trend of memory products, JPMorgan Chase recently released a research report predicting that the global comprehensive average selling price of HBM will rise by 54% year-on-year in 2027, and further rise by 25% in 2028.

Goldman Sachs recently predicted at an industry event that DRAM supply will remain tight throughout 2027, and the price increase cycle is expected to continue into the first half of 2028; the blended average price of HBM is expected to surge 122% year-on-year in 2027 to 3.7 U.S. dollars per Gb, driving HBM industry revenue to increase by more than 230%, exceeding 200 billion U.S. dollars.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Jiemian News", written by Song Jiannan, and published with authorization by 36Kr.