Global DRAM market revenue in the second quarter rose by nearly 60% from the previous quarter. Samsung Electronics maintained first place with a market share of over 39%, while SK hynix fell below 25%, narrowing the gap with third-place Micron.
According to market research firm TrendForce on the 7th, second-quarter global DRAM industry revenue was $154.73 billion (about 208 trillion won), up 59.5% from the previous quarter. Expanding demand for large language model (LLM) training and artificial intelligence (AI) inference drove shipments and price increases across various memory products.
However, the steep price uptrend in the DRAM market is expected to ease somewhat in the third quarter. Although memory makers' inventories remain at record lows, shipment growth in the second quarter was not large, and shipment expansion is also expected to be limited in the third quarter.
TrendForce projected that third-quarter DRAM price increases will slow to 13%–18% from the previous quarter. This is because some demand is shifting from high-capacity to low-capacity products, and PC and smartphone makers are finding it difficult to absorb further memory price hikes.
By company, Samsung Electronics posted second-quarter revenue of $60.98 billion (about 82 trillion won) to retain the top spot. That was up 63.4% from the previous quarter. Thanks to early mass production of HBM4, Samsung Electronics recorded the largest shipment increase among the three memory majors. Accordingly, its market share rose 0.9 percentage points from 38.5% in the first quarter to 39.4% in the second quarter.
By contrast, SK hynix increased sales but trailed the overall market growth pace. Second-quarter revenue was $38.59 billion (about 52 trillion won), up 37.9% from the previous quarter. With a high proportion of HBM shipments, the rise in average selling price (ASP) was relatively limited, pushing its share down 3.9 percentage points from 28.8% in the first quarter to 24.9% in the second quarter.
Third-place Micron closely chased SK hynix. Micron's second-quarter revenue rose 65.5% from the previous quarter to $36.0 billion (about 48 trillion won). Its share climbed from 22.4% to 23.3%. As a result, the market share gap between SK hynix and Micron narrowed from 6.4 percentage points in the first quarter to 1.6 percentage points in the second quarter.
TrendForce forecast that in 2026–2027, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron will push to expand shipments by accelerating transitions to leading-edge nodes, but the increase will be limited. As investment remains focused on advanced processes, Taiwan-based companies such as Nanya, Winbond and PSMC are expected to concentrate on mature-process DRAM and grow by absorbing demand that the three memory majors cannot fully address.