Samsung Electronics Maintains Top DRAM Position... First-Quarter Sales Surge 93.4%, Widens Gap with SK hynix

Global DRAM Sales Soar 81% to $97 Billion in Q1
Samsung Electronics Expands Market Share to 38.5%

Driven by the evolution of the artificial intelligence (AI) market, global demand for memory semiconductors has soared, resulting in worldwide DRAM sales in the first quarter surging by more than 80% compared to the previous quarter. Samsung Electronics maintained its solid number one position among the top three global memory companies by recording the steepest growth, widening its market share gap with second-place SK hynix to nearly double digits.

Yonhap News Agency

According to market research firm TrendForce on June 1, global DRAM sales in the first quarter of this year reached $97 billion (approximately KRW 146.3 trillion), marking an 81% increase from the previous quarter.

TrendForce analyzed, “As AI applications have evolved from large language model (LLM) training to inference, demand has expanded across the board for not only high-bandwidth memory (HBM) 3E, LPDDR5X, and high-capacity RDIMM, but also for RDIMM products of various capacities.”

Samsung Electronics retained its market leadership in the first quarter with overwhelming results. Samsung benefited the most from the increase in average selling price (ASP) among global memory giants such as SK hynix and US-based Micron, and also achieved the highest proportion of sales from high-profit server DRAM.

During this period, Samsung Electronics posted DRAM sales of $37.32 billion, a dramatic 93.4% jump from the previous quarter. As a result, its market share expanded by 2.5 percentage points to 38.5%.

In contrast, SK hynix, which ranked second, recorded sales of $27.98 billion in the first quarter, a 62.5% increase from the previous quarter. However, its market share fell by 3.3 percentage points to 28.8%. Consequently, the gap in market share between Samsung Electronics and SK hynix widened significantly from 3.9 percentage points in the fourth quarter of last year to 9.7 percentage points in the first quarter of this year.

TrendForce explained, “Although SK hynix had the highest proportion of HBM shipments among the top three, the overall ASP increase was somewhat limited due to a decline in HBM contract prices this year.” US-based Micron, which ranked third, saw its sales surge by 81.6% to $21.75 billion, maintaining the same market share as the previous quarter at 22.4%.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.