March 16th Update: The price surge in SSD storage is just the beginning. This trend is now pressuring manufacturers of high-capacity memory and storage smartphones, urging consumers to cherish their existing devices, as they might either face price hikes or disappear from the market altogether.
According to insider reports from the supply chain, after more than a year of oversupply, Samsung Electronics' NAND flash memory prices remained stable, aligned with production costs. Consequently, Samsung plans to negotiate with major clients to raise prices back to reasonable levels, aiming for at least a 20% increase.
Currently, temporary transaction prices for NAND continue to climb, with some categories exceeding January 2022 levels. The market is still rife with uncertainties stemming from production cuts.
Furthermore, industry insiders suggest that flagship smartphones in the latter half of this year will not adopt LPDDR6 memory but will continue to use LPDDR5x or LPDDR5T, with speeds reaching up to 9600Mbps.
Given the significant increase in memory and flash memory prices, smartphone storage configurations may have to decrease, or manufacturers may be forced to raise prices. Therefore, it's unlikely that we'll see any new smartphones with 24GB+1TB configurations this year.
