The memory manufacturers greatly cut production last year. A couple of plants shut down and there was some consolidation in the memory manufacturing world. They cut supply due to the fact that their margins on memory were too low; they wanted to jack the prices back up (like the oil companies/OPEC analogy). Now they have ramped up production again, so I would expect to see some slight decreases in the near future in memory costs. The reasons OEMs are now increasing prices on machines? Well, one is the rise in LCD prices (another supply/demand thing). Another is that OEMs have locked in prices for long periods, often a year or more, so they may not have been affected by the memory price hikes in the past few months, but are now just getting hit with the problem due to new contracts with memory makers. Memory by itself seems to be fairly quick to respond to market conditions, which is why I expect to see modest reductions in price in that area.
Facebook
Twitter