At Nehru Place in the national capital, the beginnings of a looming pricing crisis in personal electronics is taking shape, as customers and retailers alike in the sprawling computer market struggle to get their hands on RAM sticks and SSDs, components used in desktop PCs, laptops and smartphones. Over the last few weeks, prices of these computer memory components have surged with little precedent, beyond even the levels seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, as AI hyperscalers around the world crowd out a supply chain that now has less room for consumer-grade products.
At Manoj PC Wala, one of several single-unit shops, a single stick of DDR5 16GB RAM — that until November was selling for about ₹5,000 at worst — now bears a fresh MRP sticker, after the Indian importer ripped out a previous one. The current price is ₹15,000. “SSD prices have doubled, and RAM prices have increased four times,” Subhash, one of the store’s attendants said. Price data for these components reviewed by The Hindu confirm this assessment.
Early in December, one of the handful of importers for RAM sticks, which are usually installed already in pre-built PCs or laptops (and less commonly sold separately to enthusiasts or enterprises), offered some retailers a chance to buy up stock in bulk at the prevailing prices of that time. The suppliers warned that rates would only go up from there, Pramod, another attendant said. Most retailers balked, unable or unwilling to risk the down payment this offer entailed. Now, RAM and SSD prices are indeed skyrocketing, and the climb in prices could persist in the months ahead.
Consumer electronics
The root of the problem is that three firms have largely cornered the memory chip market’s supply chain: SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. These firms have been overwhelmed with orders for chips used in AI data centres by Big Tech firms that handily outbid consumer-grade electronics makers’ prices. Micron has even announced that it will shut down Crucial, its RAM brand for consumers.
The full impact of the price shock this situation will lead to — in the absence of the three firms ramping up production capacity — will only be felt in the coming months. Electronics markets like Nehru Place cater to a very small portion of consumers, who build their own hardware. Large-scale original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Dell, HP and Asus, often have long-term supply agreements that protect them from immediate price jolts.
But even these firms are preparing for price adjustments. Dell has already announced plans for increasing prices of laptops sold to enterprise customers, sparing individual buyers from price jolts for the moment. Long-planned computer procurements across government and the private sector so far have been spared: a senior State government official told The Hindu that Tamil Nadu’s plan to give away 10 lakh laptops to college students, due for distribution by March, was not impacted by the chip price surge. A senior IT Ministry official said that the price shocks had not reached large industry players yet, due to their existing reserves and supply deals with memory chip makers.
Even smartphone makers may have to scale down the level of RAM or memory they offer at a given price point, or hike prices. While smartphone prices are currently only affected at low-budget line-ups, price shocks “could spread across the broader smartphone and consumer electronics ecosystem,” Ivan Lam, an analyst with Counterpoint Research, wrote in an analysis. As India’s smartphone market is just on the right side of a recovery in shipments, the shock may have impacts for that recovery.
As far as the custom PC builders are concerned, driven as they are by a usually correct logic that assembling one’s own PC is cheaper than paying for a pre-built one, they are less willing to invest in things needing a separate RAM purchase for the moment, Subhash said. “What they thought they could build for ₹50,000 now costs ₹70,000,” he says. “So they’re not buying.”
