'How can prices fall when there's nothing left?' TeamGroup CEO reckons supply-demand memory equilibrium may not happen until late 2028 at the earliest
You may well be sick of reading about it—I am certainly sick to my stomach writing about it—but here's another doom-filled prophecy about the continuing memory crisis. Doesn't seem quite so funny calling it a RAMpocalypse now. The CEO of memory module maker TeamGroup, Chen Ching, is claiming we still haven't seen the worst of the supply crisis, and that even in 2027 "there will be no downward price trend…
'How can prices fall when there's nothing left?' TeamGroup CEO reckons supply-demand memory equilibrium may not happen until late 2028 at the earliest
"Right now you can still buy goods, they're just expensive. In a little while, you may not be able to buy goods at all."
You may well be sick of reading about it—I am certainly sick to my stomach writing about it—but here's another doom-filled prophecy about the continuing memory crisis. Doesn't seem quite so funny calling it a RAMpocalypse now. The CEO of memory module maker TeamGroup, Chen Ching, is claiming we still haven't seen the worst of the supply crisis, and that even in 2027 "there will be no downward price trend whatsoever."
According to a report from BigGo Finance, which cropped up while I was searching for a credible source after mydrivers wrote about it, Chen thinks the worst of the shortage will be from now until the middle of next year, and that we're likely to get to a point with DRAM that "even money can't buy goods".
"Right now you can still buy goods, they're just expensive," he says. "In a little while, you may not be able to buy goods at all."
This is all on the back of an earnings call for the company, where it announced record quarterly revenue of NT$10.139 billion (around $308 million), which is an increase of 34% compared with last quarter.
TeamGroup, like most memory manufacturers looking to capitalise on the current crisis, is prioritising where it can get the most cash from, and that comes from selling direct to data centre and enterprise folk, rather than us normies. Just as chatty Sam Altman would like it to be. Fully two thirds of TeamGroup's business is now selling into other businesses, where previously that percentage was just a quarter, with the majority going into the consumer market.
Chen claims its relationships with vendors will help it continue to get inventory, even if it has to pay premium spot prices for it. But he notes that supply will continue to be the big problem, suggesting that supply and demand equilibrium is unlikely to be achieved any time before the second half of 2028, or potentially even later.
And, obviously, that means prices will remain high, or more likely keep rising. "How can prices fall when there's nothing left?" he questions like a good little doom-monger. Good 'ere, innit?
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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