Smaller phone and laptop makers dig in for years of memory scarcity

Independent phone and ​laptop makers are redesigning products, testing incoming chips for fakes and passing on costs ‌as a memory shortage they expect to last through 2027 squeezes the lower end of the device market. Availability, not price, is the binding constraint, executives at three companies said. “If you don’t have allocation, you’re out of the game ​anyhow,” said Raymond van Eck, chief executive of Dutch repairable-phone maker Fairphone. Memory maker SK Hynix’s (000660. KS) ​CEO in July said 2027 would be “the worst year in the industry’s history from ⁠the supply perspective,” with demand outstripping capacity beyond 2030. Counterpoint Research forecast in June that smartphone shipments would ​fall 13. 9 per cent this year to 1. 08 billion units, the steepest annual decline on record, as memory costs ​make entry-level phones uneconomical to build.

THE RALLY SLOWS, THE SHORTAGE DOESN’T TrendForce expects conventional volatile memory (DRAM) contract prices up 13-18 per cent this quarter, against 93-98 per cent in the first. Jolla, a Finnish handset maker founded by former Nokia engineers, said its combined ​storage and DRAM package rose to a peak at the end of March and has held ​since, confounding spring forecasts of a doubling by autumn. “We are very happy for that, of course, for the time ‌being,” said ⁠Chief Executive Sami Pienimäki, who expects supply to normalise only from 2028. The scale of the mismatch became clear late last year, said Nirav Patel, chief executive of US repairable-laptop maker Framework, prompting “everyone trying to grab as much supply, as much inventory as they could, as quickly as they could”, which ​deepened the shortage. Unable to ​afford a stockpile, Framework ⁠places non-cancellable…