Samsung Electronics Retains Global DRAM No. 1 Spot in Q1; DRAM Prices to Rise Further in Q2

[Financial News] Samsung Electronics widened its share of the global DRAM market in the first quarter of this year, cementing its lead. Driven by surging demand for memory used in Artificial Intelligence Servers, the company saw revenue jump more than 90% from the previous quarter, while the gap with rival SK hynix also widened significantly.
According to market researcher TrendForce on the 1st, Samsung Electronics posted DRAM revenue of $37.323 billion in the first quarter, up 93.4% from the previous quarter, and held on to the top global spot by revenue. Its market share rose 2.5 percentage points from the previous quarter to 38.5%. Among the top three memory makers, including SK hynix and U.S. chipmaker Micron, Samsung recorded the highest increase in average selling price (ASP), while also having the largest share of server DRAM revenue.
In the same period, SK hynix, which ranked second, generated $27.982 billion in revenue, up 62.5% from the previous quarter. However, its market share fell 3.3 percentage points to 28.8%. The gap with Samsung Electronics widened to 9.7 percentage points in the first quarter from 3.9 percentage points in the fourth quarter of last year. TrendForce said, "SK hynix had the highest share of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) shipments among the top three companies, but the decline in HBM contract prices this year partially limited the overall increase in ASP."
Micron ranked third with revenue of $21.75 billion, up 81.6%. Its market share stood at 22.4%, unchanged from the previous quarter.
TrendForce analyzed that rising contract prices for commodity DRAM continued throughout the first quarter, and the top three companies — Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron — prioritized production and shipments of higher-margin server products. Supply remains constrained in the second quarter, with DRAM vendors' inventories staying at very low levels. As a result, TrendForce forecast that contract prices for commodity DRAM will rise an additional 58% to 63% from the previous quarter in the second quarter.
Meanwhile, global DRAM revenue in the first quarter reached $97 billion, up 81% from the previous quarter. The increase was attributed to growing demand not only for HBM3E, LPDDR5X and high-capacity RDIMMs, but also for RDIMMs of various capacities, as Artificial Intelligence applications evolve from large language model training toward inference.
soup@fnnews.com Im Su-bin Reporter