The memory market is still challenging
During Evertiq Expo in Berlin earlier this June, Evertiq took the opportunity to speak to Mark Baumgärtner, Vice President of Sales EMEA at memory specialist memory distributor Memphis Electronic, to see how the memory market is moving and how the company is doing in the current market climate.
We have just completed the first half of 2024 and according to Mr Baumgärtner, the year so far has been challenging.
“Book to bill is the big thing. Book to bill is not as it should be. Sales are still relatively good, but the order intake at the same time is not. I mean, everyone was expecting 2024 to recover, but it's like postponed.”
Why do you think that it has been postponed, why hasn't the year developed the way that we anticipated?
“You need to look at the whole picture. You need to look at the economy. I mean, we have still two wars going on in Europe at our borders. Geopolitics, you know, trade wars, you know, so people in the industry are not so optimistic in investing. And also there's a lot of parts still in the supply chain at the OEMs, and they are not shipping because their customers are not ordering.”
Memphis, being completely focused on memory, what trends are you seeing? We all know about AI requiring a lot of memory, but besides AI, what trends are you seeing on the horizon?
“I mean, we see a lot of change now in the used mobile technologies like LPDDR4, LPDDR4X, LPDDR5. And this is interesting. Usually, it takes longer till those technologies arrive in the industry. They are hardly consumer-oriented, but now they are there. But again, I mean, we are not really enjoying the AI hype because we are not selling any HBM or all those AI server-based memories. So the vendors enjoying the market, yeah, but the industry is not part of that.”
So with that pessimistic beginning, how does the second half of 2024 look?
“I don't really think the second half will bring a lot of change. But we are pretty convinced that in 2025, the overall picture will change. But again, this depends on the economy. It depends on the economy, depends on the war going on. It depends on the election in the U.S. And all that.”
And for Mr Baumgärtner, it’s not a question of if the tide will turn, it will. It's just a matter of time.
