And then in 5 years they'll all settle for a few million dollars in a class action for price fixing. Rinse, repeat.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Of course, the customer payout will eventually amount to $5/affected customer, but only those who replied to their rather invasive survey, paid out over 3 payments over the coming year.
Don't forget it's usually just US citizens who even get the chance to jump onto such class action suits. The rest of the world don't even get their $5.
Just the cost of doing business. Just ask all the hedgefunds that break the rules time and time again and simply pay a small fee to FINRA (if at all)
What a surprise, capitalists can’t keep making more money quarter after quarter so instead they just rack up the prices for no reason other than the c-suite wants more bonus money.
Fucking PATHETIC and reprehensible
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Nobody is buying so let's increase the price. Makes a lot of sense. Good job guys.
If people generally atent buying, there’s still People that need to buy (businesses, oems, etc)
They’re just doing the ol covid ratchet. Tightening the thumbscrews on the people who can’t opt out.
Doesn’t affect their bottom line much if nobody’s choosing to buy.
Yup, Meta is buying $9 Billion of GPUs but no SSDs. Nope!
They store the fake news in GDDR6X.
They drastically increased production after covid, and then with inflation and the economy slowing down, demand crashed, meaning they had a fuckton of NAND and nobody to sell it to. They needed to get rid of it so they sold it all at a steep discount below the break even mark, losing billions of dollars in the process (I don't think any NAND manufacturer had a profitable 2023?). Now, they're cutting back production to profitable levels that actually meet demand, so prices will increase and return to normal.
So, uh, collusive behavior?
It wouldn't even be the first time for them.
Probably not even the tenth time.
They lost billions of dollars due to production being way higher than demand during 2023, it's only collusion in the sense that they all want to actually make some money on the NAND they manufacture.
Demand is way down, so they raise prices. This is the cycle that keeps repeating, and nobody should be surprised.
That's.... thats's not how this works.
It's exactly how this works, and during a quarterly review with Samsung, they literally told me they were doing this. Nobody in the industry is surprised by this.
Not sure why you'd deny what you literally see happening.
The only claim in this thread that demand is down is from you. When demand is already low, prices going up makes no sense.
This is not to say that someone wouldn't do it anyways, but then there's also Erdoğan who lowered interests to "combat inflation" against advice of his central bankers, whom he fired. Then inflation becomes worse and surprised Pikachu face ensues
I have information directly from the three main manufacturers. Demand is down, production is down, so in order to not show losses on the balance sheet prices went up.
TSMC did the same thing last year- raised prices by around 27% for all customers. Because demand is way, WAY down. Sadly their increase wasn't enough to stave off a drop in revenue.
When you have the whole market cornered, normal supply and demand economics don't apply.
Do they have a captive audience for those who still have a demand? I can understand "look, if we have to keep the production lines going to provide you with required hardware, of which we are not selling as much as we used to, we have to raise prices" - but if the customers who still buy are flexible, this would only mean even less people buy.
Customers are fairly inflexible. If you need storage or ram for 10k new servers, that's it. You have to have it. And since all manufacturers raised prices, you're going to spend more. Making matters worse, if you have to onboard another vendor to safe a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands on time and resources to go through a qualification cycle alone.
Home computers make up a significantly smaller portion of the computer component space. So while this might prevent a person from upgrading their SSD or building a DDR 5 equipped gaming computer, that's small percentages of sales. A single corporate relationship account will buy thousands of devices at a time, larger accounts will buy tens of hundreds of thousands. A cloud operator building 10k servers with 12 channels of RAM will buy 24 dimms per server. It's a totally different game.
In principal I would say "fair enough", except that for cloud operators, the service prices would also probably increase, possibly leading to less end user demand for cloud space. Anyways, your point is well constructed, I concede ;) Although the logic "less customers, therefore let's raise prices" would drive a lot of vendors into bankrupcy.
It shouldn't (edited) matter if the rise the prices. Nobody's buying, right?
What?
Typo...
Ok. Well, people are buying all the production. But production is down. And they control the price so they raised that too.
Welcome to free market capitalism.
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The main factor is normally panic article like this.
"Hey, the price is going to go up later this year!"
*people buy now*
*demand goes up*
*price goes up*
They're not even going to make an excuse for it like "the power went off for a split second in one room at one factory ~~because we flicked a switch~~"? Regardless, I'm fine with waiting years for them to tire themselves out with all the screaming about how prices must rise. It gives me great pleasure to not reward this behavior while they're pulling this shit. Raise the prices all you want, I'm not buying.
Well, I saw this coming and got a new 2TB SSD before 11.11 even. Though now thinking if I should have gotten 4TB instead. xD
Also, this kinda is like collusion, no?
Maybe that's their real play here? Put out a bunch of news about upcoming price hikes, and watch everyone scramble to buy up their current stock.
Of course they are because they see line go up.
Oh look, more stuff I just won't buy if prices go up.
In the US there is enormous investment in new NAND and other chips manufacturing. The government does not want these products and materials to be expensive or scarce. So the good news is the US gov will likely jump on this immediately.
I feel like China enacting protectionist policies on lithium will do more to drive up chip prices. People are broke right now, so choking out the retail supply of chips to artificially raise prices will just result in miserable quarters for Micron, Hynix, and Samsung.
Too late, I was buying up a bunch of high TBW solid state drives the last ~2 years, even this Black Friday/Boxing Day there were a few last deals.
My focus was mostly on Intel Optane leftovers, but also Samsung Pro (NVMe, SATA, even microSD), Kingston enterprise (DC500M/DC600M/DC1500M, NVMe, SD/microSD), even some Seagate Nytro SATA/SAS enterprise drives, Crucial MX500, WD Red, and a bunch of other brands.
I'm a data hoarder organizer for family/relatives/friends I regularly give tech support for and myself. I love to recycle old PC I've build previously into NAS, media center, NVR or whatever new projects or ideas they come up with.
Unfortunately, I may have missed out on some great DDR4 and DDR5 deals I saw but was thinking it was not immediately necessary 🫤... oh well... we win some and lose some.
i wouldnt mind to snag a deal on some premium ddr3. but if they raise the price, then nvm. i'll wait till next year.
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