Samsung Joins Micron and SanDisk in Raising Memory Prices by Up to 30%

According to Micron and Sandisk, Samsung also attracts the price screw for the memory. According to a report, the South Korean manufacturer will soon increase up to 30 percent and for NAND flash by up to ten percent.

Storage becomes significantly more expensive

While it was still said at the end of 2024 that the prices for RAM would fall by up to 15 percent in 2025, a completely different picture emerged almost ten months later. While DDR4-RAM has been becoming more and more expensive for a while due to production stops and sometimes costs more than the DDR5 memory, Samsung has now announced that the contract prices for dram and NAND flash memory can also be lifted in the fourth quarter of 2025.

LPDDDR4X and LPDDR5 (X) should therefore attract 15 to 30 percent, while NAND flash memory is used by five to ten percent for “mobile storage” such as Universal Flash Storage (UFS) and EMMC. Samsung is not only with his pricing policy. Micron temporarily stopped new offer cycles and also raised the prices by up to 30 percent. Sandisk also communicated a ten percent price increase for NAND products. The coordinated price increases show that the large storage manufacturers react to similar market conditions.

Production change tightened location

According to New Daily (via Wccftech) are responsible for the price increases. An important reason is also in the production changeover of the manufacturers. The already mentioned falling production figures for older products such as DDR4 and LPDDR4X lead to supply bottlenecks that tighten the price pressure. The production capacity for GDR4, which is to expire gradually, will probably fall to 20 percent of the values ​​of the previous year in 2026.

At the same time, the manufacturers are increasingly focusing on high-end memory for AI applications. The demand for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is also increasing, whereby all major dram manufacturers are now jumping on the AI ​​train and offering their latest products for AI accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD and others. This prioritization of HBM compared to consumer dram also leads to a shorter offer and increasing prices.

Samsung enormous influence

Samsung takes second place in the global dram market and first place in the Nand Flash market with 32.7 and 32.9 percent market share. This market position gives the company enormous influence on global storage prices. Experts predict that the operating profit of the semiconductor division DS (Device Solutions) could exceed the six trillion won (around 4.3 billion euros) in the fourth quarter of 2025. That would be more than twice as much as in the same period last year.

The price increases should affect particularly mobile devices, since smartphones, tablets, handhelds and compact notebooks are particularly affected by the LPDDR price increases. Investors predict that this wave of increases will last until the end of the year and possibly until the first half of the next year. The memory prices continue to rise – a trend that could continue until next year.