Samsung Electronics released its preliminary third-quarter results on October 8: operating profit of about KRW 107.4 trillion, up 782.5% year on year, on revenue of KRW 195 trillion, up 126.6%. Brokerage Meritz estimates that the memory business contributed roughly KRW 109 trillion of that profit. DRAM shipments grew only 3.4% from the previous quarter while average selling prices jumped 20.1%, and NAND ASP climbed 19% — price, not volume, is the engine of this earnings cycle. Commodity quotes tell the same story: according to DRAMeXchange, the DDR4 8Gb contract price rose from $6.3 a year earlier to $26 this September, and 128Gb MLC NAND climbed from $3.8 to $30.6.
The tightness is structural rather than cyclical. HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity of conventional DRAM of the same bit density, and the major memory makers have shifted production toward HBM and enterprise storage. TrendForce expects fourth-quarter contract prices for conventional DRAM to rise 10%-15% sequentially and NAND Flash to rise 15%-20%. Samsung's HBM4 prices are expected to roughly double next year, and SK hynix judges that the supply-demand imbalance may persist beyond 2030.
For China's electronic-component supply chain, the price wave is passing through end-market BOMs: retail prices of 1TB SSDs have climbed from RMB 300-400 in 2023 to more than RMB 1,000, raising memory-material costs for smartphones, TWS earphones and smart-home devices. YMTC reached a 14% share of the NAND market in the second quarter, ranking third globally, and its third Wuhan fab is expected to start operating by the end of 2026, with total capacity set to more than double — the supply capability of domestic NOR Flash and SPI NAND is strengthening in step. In a phase of shortages and rising prices, distributors with verified genuine-product channels and dynamic inventory alerts can help customers lock in supply and smooth BOM swings.