Now to get someone to investigate the RAM market for its blatant price fixing
Cash eviction: EU writes-back to most recently-used RAM manufacturers
-- E.U
They aren't setting any minimum floors or requiring retailers to set any floor. Heck, they don't even sell to retail directly anymore.
Price fixing is a serious allegation, you can't just come up with price history and throw allegations around.
[1] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/samsung-hynix-micron-su...
There is no law about an upper ceiling on pricing. Would you say Nvidia is price fixing because their volta products are priced "suspiciously high"?
> There's no smoking gun, but there have been lawsuits [1]
There are lawsuits like these left and right, read any company's 10-Q about how random law firms file suits in the name of investor losses or consumer rights. Doesn't mean those suit hold any ground.
> A lot of water cooler talk is happening right now that something is going on.
Seriously?
> Given that there is only 3 major players in the market these days with Samsung doing most of the heavy lifting, it wouldn't take much.
Still more diverse than Google Search, Microsoft Windows, Intel/AMD CPU, Nvidia/AMD GPU.
Monopoly (or Tripoly?) does not equate to price fixing and collusion.
No, but AMD would (I have no clue if they do) release a cheaper product and therefore get the biggest market share.
The problem is not about Samsung setting a high price. It's about all three companies setting that high price, seemingly together.
And how many AMD cards have you seen being used for DL? Hint: 0
> The problem is not about Samsung setting a high price. It's about all three companies setting that high price, seemingly together.
Parent is implying collusion and fixing on the sole basis of prices being above historical means, that's not price fixing.
Also, you're describing price fixing, not providing an evidence that it is possibly taking place. I work in Azure, so I know quite a bit about the current pricing environment around semis. It isn't as much as fixing as is the sudden explosive demand for their products.
* Take a look at the historical earnings for these companies, they were barely scraping by a couple years ago (Micron was under >$10B debt which was more than 50% of their market cap at the time). You can't justify capex on growing supply when you don't even have money to cover debt.
* Look at the trend of DRAM attach rates and software requirements for memory, nowdays everyone is happy running an entire instance of chrome for their communication, editor and what not; Deep Learning and data economy have taken off in the past few years which is requiring records amount of both logic and memory chips.
The current prices are a function of demand and supply. I do see them heading slightly lower on better margins due to lower debt and better yields on more mature processes (possibly even 1Y nm process node this year) but we'll be here for a while without any price fixing.
Regarding €1000 — if a country like France wouldn’t have a 20% VAT, prices would be lower obviously. So perhaps we should “investigate” the 20% VAT? Maybe we should “investigate” the French labor laws that contribute to the cost of goods sold? There are a lot of things we “could” investigate — or we can just accept that companies will price their good appropriately based on the market demand. This isn’t like it’s an essential item required for basic life. Maybe we could investigate why France has strict milk quotas that necessarily increase the price of milk? Investigating milk prices has a lot more relevance to people than the pricing of a luxury item like a high end smartphone.
To be clear, I am not suggesting we investigate anything, only pointing out the absurdity of complaining about smartphone pricing when the EU has plenty of other products that are subject to price manipulation based on political interests. The EU has had tariffs for decades on imports, making everything more expensive. But sure, let’s complain about Apple and Samsung while ignoring textiles, food, cars and machine parts all of which are subject to tariffs that raise prices.
Of course iPhones are ridiculously overpriced, and Apple has huge margins. But that's absolutely fine. There is plenty of competition in the smartphone space and people willing to bite the Apple are welcome to do so.
PS, yes, the agriculture rules in the EU are sometimes crazy, but to a certain extent they do actually serve the purpose of guaranteeing local production capabilities, which is important.
If you want a high-end phone, you have to pay proportionally more. But that's normal and applies to nearly everything else, too.