logoalt Hacker News

jmb99today at 4:43 AM1 replyview on HN

As someone currently dealing with pricing changes for DDR5 volume contracts (admittedly, only ~30k DIMMs, but still), those contracts are a lot less rigidly priced than we (engineering) realized at the time - “agreed price” is a lot more... flexible... until the pallet is delivered. Especially because our contract is with our manufacturer who has their own contract with a DIMM manufacturer who has their own contract with the DRAM manufacturer. DRAM is substantially more like a spot market than the average consumer would expect (at least at my volumes). The same is true for my HDDs (~100k unit/year contract) and my CPUs (10k unit/year contract). At least for HDDs our contract quantities are getting honoured (and we actually still have Seagate and WD fighting for our business), which I’ve heard hasn’t been the case for smaller orders.


Replies

Panzer04today at 8:20 AM

Yep. It's a bit like some gas projects when prices spiked due to Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Companies had supply agreements in place but they will find essentially any excuse to "delay" delivery. You might eventually get your product but fat lot of good it does for you while you're mired in court and not getting anything anyway.

The particularly amusing example is a project continuously selling spot LNG while saying it's not yet operational, stiffing the companies with which they'd signed long term contracts with on a technicality.