The latest report issued by US-based foreign-invested Morgan Stanley (Mogul) points out that as the mainstream memory market strengthens, DDR4 and DDR3 will have greater room for price increases in the fourth quarter. The price stability of Legacy N...
The latest report issued by US-based foreign-invested Morgan Stanley (Mogul) points out that as the mainstream memory market strengthens, DDR4 and DDR3 will have greater room for price increases in the fourth quarter. The price stability of Legacy NAND and NOR memory is gradually increasing and is expected to continue until 2026. Among them, Winbond is the preferred target, and the target price is raised to 50 yuan.
Morgan Stanley pointed out that in the DRAM part, it has been observed that mainstream memory suppliers have stopped providing quotations to enterprise customers, which means that there is still room for price upside, and it upgraded Micron to "outperform" because it is not too late to participate in the memory upcycle. As for NAND, SanDisk has contacted Power Semiconductor to discuss possible future production capacity support, but Morgan Stanley believes that the chance of cooperation is low.
Morgan Stanley expects that the DDR4 supply shortage ratio will reach 10-15% in the next three quarters, and back-end process bottlenecks may further aggravate this situation. Therefore, the contract prices of some DDR4 specifications may double in the fourth quarter. The current DDR4 quote validity period has been shortened to less than a month, indicating that prices may increase again within weeks. In addition, DDR3 is experiencing stronger growth and is expected to see high double-digit growth in the fourth quarter.
For NOR flash memory, Morgan Stanley maintains its fourth-quarter growth forecast of 5-10%. With the potential growth in demand for Internet of Things (IoT) products such as AirPods and servers, the NOR supply gap will expand from low single digits to mid-single digits. Morgan Stanley expects that AirPods will account for 5–10% of global NOR demand by 2026, because each pair of AirPods requires three high-density NOR flash memory chips, which means that the price increase trend of NOR is expected to continue until 2026.
In response to the recent memory growth, Morgan Stanley reiterated that Winbond is the preferred target and raised the target price to 50 yuan. Winbond is expected to start producing 8Gb DDR4 in the first quarter of 2026; AP Memory and Power Semiconductor can partially benefit from the strong increase in DDR3 prices, with target prices reaching 435 yuan and 30 yuan respectively.
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