After rising to outlandish prices some time ago, memory prices have finally dropped back down to relatively affordable levels. Once upon a time, you'd be shelling out upwards of $160 for a single 16GB DDR4 kit, but now, that same kit will only run you about $73 on Amazon.

That's already a pretty nice drop, but if a recent report from "leading" market research and analysis firm Gartner is anything to go by, we could see prices lower even further; significantly so, in fact.

The analyst says a "demand-driven oversupply" in the DRAM market could cause memory prices to go down by as much as 42.1 percent sometime in 2019. This drop is expected to last quite some time, too: Gartner says the excess stock might not get sold off until Q2 2020. Given that the PC industry as a whole has already seen plenty of price volatility, a reduction like that seems almost believable.

...a "demand-driven oversupply" in the DRAM market could cause memory prices to go down by as much as 42.1 percent sometime in 2019.

At any rate, Gartner also says worldwide semiconductor revenue will likely drop from $475 billion (2018 figures) to $429 billion this year, which is a decline of roughly 9.6 percent. The research firm mostly attributes this potential drop to the ongoing trade war between the US and China, a "weaker pricing environment" for memory and other chip types, as well as reduced growth in smartphone, server, and PC sales.

As exciting as this report is, it is just that: an analyst's report. It isn't a guarantee of future pricing, and market researchers, though they are often accurate, have been known to be wrong from time to time.

Still, lower prices are always good for consumers, so we hope Gartner's predictions will hold water in the coming months.

 

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