Memory-maker Micron has found a way to keep prices for its products sky-high for another five years, by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.”
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
What alternatives would you suggest?
There sadly are none, now, outside of the “Big Three” who all did the same.
I’d suggest we start actively targeting smaller businesses for our suport, to prevent a monopol… Or triopoly in this case, from allowing everyone to be screwed by collusion and manipulation of markets and pricing.
Not a lot you can do with RAM, or SSDs, or GPUs now, but if we get competitors crop up we should be active in our suport of them and avoiding the ones who want to charge you $600 for an SD card now.
Plus a lot of this is part of the Bezos plan to force everyone into cloud computiong so all your data belongs to corporations and they can do whatever their constantly changing EULAs allow while overriding legal protecations like how a Health Exchange bypasses HIPPA laws and a corporate owned messenger is excluded from wiretapping laws if they sell their data to the agencies.