Apple is reported to have purchased memory chips at high prices! Sacrificing profits just to squeeze out competitors. Smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo have announced price adjustments in response.

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（Source: NetEase Technology）

The memory market has fallen into tight supply due to the booming demand for high-bandwidth memory driven by artificial intelligence, while traditional memory is also in short supply because many production lines have been tied up. Against this backdrop, Apple appears to be adopting a controversial business tactic to further expand its market share.

According to supply-chain information from the semiconductor industry, Apple is reportedly purchasing all available mobile DRAM chips on the market at extremely high prices, even if it has to sacrifice part of its operating profits. The goal is to prevent competitors from getting enough memory chips.

This speculation is almost the same as the view expressed in January this year by well-known analyst Guo Mingqi (郭明錤).

At the time, Guo Mingqi said that memory price increases would affect Apple’s gross margin. However, absorbing the higher costs would help Apple capture a larger market share, and Apple could make up for the loss through services.

Earlier reports indicated that Apple even agreed to their demands to significantly raise the prices of memory chips without negotiating with Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.

Apple is sweeping the market at any cost—more like a straightforward but well-planned “strategic maneuver” in commercial war:

Eliminate most competitors through a price war,

and possibly bring rich returns

From Apple’s own perspective, it is accelerating its new product roadmap. In addition to launching the $599 low-priced MacBook Neo to enter the mid-tier notebook market, it also plans to release mid-range mobile models such as iPhone 17e. It urgently needs sufficient memory chips to support production capacity, while also maintaining performance advantages of its high-end products. Compared with other manufacturers, Apple has nearly no room to compromise on memory configuration to protect its brand reputation, so it can only lock in supply through aggressive buying.

Apple CEO Tim Cook previously said that memory chips and TSMC’s 3-nanometer production capacity are the company’s main constraints on development. But judging from its current actions, Apple is leveraging its ample cash reserves to address its supply-chain pressures while further expanding its market share.

Moreover, the tight global memory market makes Apple’s aggressive stockpiling look even more urgent—this situation is closely related to production capacity planning.

Global memory chip supply is mainly dominated by three giants: Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron. In recent years, these companies have been shifting their capacity toward high-margin high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to meet the explosive demand from AI servers, causing a major contraction in production capacity for traditional consumer-level memories such as mobile DRAM.

Goldman Sachs data shows:

In 2026, the estimated DRAM supply shortage rate will reach 4.9%, the worst level in 15 years, and the NAND flash supply shortage rate is also expected to rise to 4.2%.

Pressure from tight memory supply has long passed through to the end mobile phone market, and some major smartphone brands have already started adjusting prices.

Affected by memory price increases, Xiaomi raised the prices of related REDMI models and canceled some special offers; meanwhile, mobile phone makers such as OPPO and vivo have also officially announced price adjustments for some already released models to cope with rising storage hardware costs.

So far, Apple’s stockpiling strategy has begun to show initial results. MediaTek and Qualcomm have been forced to cut 4-nanometer chip output, which corresponds to reducing the supply of 15 million to 20 million mobile chips, directly dragging down the shipment pace of mid-to-low-end smart phones in the Android camp. Samsung has also raised prices of multiple tablets and phones in South Korea to cover memory cost pressure.

In the long run, with its ample cash reserves, Apple will further squeeze the survival space of smaller and medium-sized end-device manufacturers. These companies will be unable to absorb continuously rising costs and will have to shrink production scale due to a lack of memory chips, and may even be pushed out of the market.

TrendForce (集邦咨询) data shows:

Over the past three months, the spot prices of mobile storage chips have cumulatively risen by more than 300%. If Apple were to stockpile on a large scale, it would inevitably cause this uptrend to continue. The industry generally expects that the price increase cycle for storage chips will last until 2027.

As for consumers, higher prices for end products may become the norm. Whether it’s phones, computers, or other smart devices, value-for-money will decline and consumer demand may be restrained.

Source: Caixin Network, Global Net Technology

Editor: Xiao Xu

Reviewer: Pan Li; Wang Chenyu

Proofreader: Jin Qiu

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