According to reports the company has informed its US customers that while some of its products are currently exempt from tariffs, the US administration’s definition of “semiconductors” does not cover memory modules and SSDs.
Most of Micron’s production is based in Asia, including China, Taiwan, and Japan and so it is going to be affected by tariffs and now there are concerns that both Samsung and SK Hynix are likely to implement similar policies.
Micron said that it will look to pass on the tariff burden to customers, in addition to a recent 10% price hike on memory products. Both Samsung and SK hynix also produce DRAM and SSDs in Asia and they too are likely to be heavily impacted.
According to Reuters an Asian NAND module maker is telling its US customers to manage the new tariffs themselves. “If they won’t cover the taxes, we simply won’t ship,” the executive reportedly stated.
While semiconductors have been exempted from tariffs, it remains unclear as to whether this applies to chip units alone or to finished products, adding yet further confusion to an industry already struggling to adapt to the changing global trading environment - memory semiconductors are rarely traded as individual chips but rather as modules on a substrate (PCB), meaning that tariffs will have an impact on almost all memory semiconductors.
The semiconductor industry has already been hit hard by rising raw material costs, weak demand, and fierce competition, so for suppliers of memory the situation has just gone from bad to worse!
