In 2022, the prices of memory and flash storage chips will continue to decline, and the products will fall to the price of cabbage. Consumers can save a lot of money by buying memory and SSDs, but manufacturers are not satisfied with this situation. The upgrade of advanced technology will also slow down.
This is what Micron did. The company recently released its financial report for the Q1 quarter of fiscal year 2023. Its revenue of US$4.09 billion fell by nearly half compared to last year, while its net loss was US$195 million, compared with a profit of US$2.3 billion in the same period last year.
For this reason, Micron also announced a layoff plan. It plans to reduce the number of employees by regarding 10% in the 2023 calendar year through a combination of voluntary layoffs and layoffs, affecting regarding 4,800 people, and at the same time suspend the 2023 bonus.
These measures are not enough, Micron has also significantly reduced capital spending in 2023,The original plan was to invest US$12 billion, but now it has been reduced to US$7 billion to US$7.5 billion, a reduction of nearly 40%.
Such cuts not only affect production capacity in 2023, but even advanced technologies will slow down,The CEO of Micron has made it clear that the company will delay the upgrade process of memory chips to advanced technology, and the latest 232-layer flash memory in terms of flash memory will not be introduced soon, so we have to wait and see.
Micron’s move was regarded as bad by many netizens, because when Micron released 232-layer flash memory not long ago, it was still vigorously promoting how advanced its flash memory technology is. Flash memory has long been on the market.
At the beginning, I praised how ruthless the 232-layer flash memory is, but this wave of bad performance is so ugly.
Of course, compared to Micron, which only delays the upgrade of new technologies, some manufacturers are taking advantage of the fire——Samsung, the flash memory and memory leader of memory chips, raised the price of 3D flash memory by 10% this month.
Under the current situation of declining consumer demand, Samsung still dares to raise prices once morest the market, which is considered to be related to the suppression of YMTC. Some customers can only switch to other flash memory manufacturers, and Samsung has the opportunity to raise prices.
