TAIPEI – With the smartphone market affected by the returning seasonal influence in the first half of 2016, mobile DRAM is forecast to experience quarterly price declines of 6 to 8% as a result of falling demand and increasing supply, says DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce.

“Expanded smartphone shipments will fuel mobile DRAM demand and limit the decline of its average selling price to within 5% during the fourth quarter,” said Avril Wu, assistant vice president at DRAMeXchange.

Some 345.9 million smartphones will be shipped in the fourth quarter of 2015, up 3.7% sequentially, says TrendForce. The fourth quarter will see the largest smartphone shipment volume of any quarter this year, accounting for 27% of the estimated 1.28 billion units to be shipped in 2015.

Since the mobile DRAM market has the most stable price trend compared with PC DRAM and server DRAM markets, the big three DRAM suppliers have continued to shift more of their capacity toward mobile DRAM relative to other applications, says the research firm.

The manufacturing of the next generation of mobile DRAM, LPDDR4, requires the 20nm process to advance to a level that can support 8Gb mono-die production. Currently, Samsung supplies the majority of LPDDR4, according to TrendForce.

Nonetheless, the share of LPDDR4 in overall mobile DRAM production is expected to increase significantly in the latter half of 2016, when both SK Hynix and Micron will ship LPDDR4 made with 21/20nm processes.

DRAMeXchange anticipates this next-generation mobile memory will become the market mainstream by the end of the next year at the earliest, and the surge in its supply will inevitably increase the downward pressure on mobile DRAM prices.