Your three memory vendors are one vendor

Fourteen consumers and three small businesses, including PC retailers, filed suit in a California federal court on June 25 against Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron, the three companies that make most of the world’s DRAM. The complaint alleges they coordinated supply and pricing from 2022 onward, pushing memory prices up roughly 700% over four years.

The mechanism the plaintiffs describe is about supply. They say the three producers systematically coordinated a shift of capacity toward high-bandwidth memory and discontinued DDR3 and DDR4 in step, so that the transition to HBM served as cover for cutting the supply of commodity DRAM. The buyer sees three suppliers on the datasheet; the complaint says they moved as one.

Apple’s recent product price increases were the stated trigger. The plaintiffs point to “chipflation” reaching consumer hardware as the reason they filed when they did.

The firm behind the suit is Bathaee Dunne, which previously won a case alleging collusion in Google’s digital advertising. It wants class certification covering every consumer and business that bought a product containing DRAM, a very wide net. If the case is certified and the plaintiffs win, US antitrust law trebles the damages.

Two of the three defendants have been here before. Samsung and SK hynix were found to have fixed DRAM prices in the US in the early 2000s, drawing large fines and prison sentences for executives. That history doesn’t prove the current claim, but it is not a comfortable starting point for the defence.

At this stage the case is fourteen people and three shops in a filing, not a settlement. If it is certified, the exposure scales to the size of the entire DRAM market. For now, Jefferies and other industry watchers expect the suit to have no effect on memory prices at least through the end of the year.