The increases follow one another and Intel’s announcement last week has now been taken up by AMD, which indicates that it wants to increase the price of its chips by 15% compared to the year 2025.
Increasing by 15% will not mean that the chips released by AMD will retail for only 15% more expensive. This increase will undoubtedly have multiple cascading effects. This is the retail price recommended by AMD but in this type of scenario, the in-store readings are always quite spectacularly higher. Particularly because wholesalers do not necessarily change the envelope allocated to the purchase of chips. With a 15% increase that’s 15% fewer chips and therefore fewer processors distributed to retailers. Again, those who put the most on the table or make the largest order will be delivered and with fewer offers, prices will also evolve.
One of the main side effects of this current component crisis is that customers are holding back their investments. Between RAM, processors and the rest, prices have skyrocketed. Another problem is that the scarcity of certain products such as memory makes many investments impossible. Which causes hardware sales to plummet quite steeply.
Integrators like Lenovo, HP, Dell and others will see their ratings increase to the same extent while facing a drop in their sales, which will push them to want to compensate for the erosion of their turnover. Not only will chips sold directly in stores be more expensive, but even portable machines or other pre-assembled desktop PCs will be well above 2025 prices. For a buyer, this therefore means that they must assume the increase in RAM, storage and processor in addition to the increase in transport costs which will begin to be felt with the war in Iran. The final rating on purchasing a complete machine will be harsh compared to that of 2025.
From the end of the month, Intel and AMD prices will therefore increase. Lead times will also lengthen as the production focus of both manufacturers shifts ever more towards the world of servers. There was a delay of one to two weeks between the order and receipt of a batch of processors at the same period in 2025. Today, it takes ten to twelve weeks for the same result. A deadline that has become incompressible and very problematic for manufacturers who must now make impossible bets.
Increasing prices and deadlines: the right recipe for failure
Imagine having to launch a product for the start of the school year in September. By ordering processors in April, you will receive them in June. You will only have July and August left to assemble the parts, start production, test, package, ship and distribute the materials to retailers. Machines ready to be shipped for the beginning of September generally begin to be stored at dealers from the beginning of August and at worst by the 15th of the month. Many purchases are made during back-to-school shopping with school supplies. So that only leaves June and July to manufacture. And again, we only count on July if we accept rapid transport by plane. Transport which further increases the price of machines…
Add to this the risk of being poorly positioned in terms of price. If you want to develop a laptop for 12 weeks, you need to anticipate the price of RAM and storage for this period. Which is absolutely impossible at the moment. Buying before a memory price drop would disqualify your hardware, but ordering memory today with a bet that it will go up again in the next 12 weeks is also very risky.
On the MiniPC market, everyone is looking gloomy. The machines have already changed a lot in price. But also and above all the most affordable components have almost disappeared from the catalogs. Impossible to get your hands on, even more expensively, basic chips from AMD or Intel. Some are taking refuge in alternative chips, others are simply reducing the size of their orders.
And each week that passes seems to complicate the situation even more.
Rising prices and falling availability, the processor market is becoming more complicated
