By The Share Table: Samsung 39%, SK Hynix 26%, Micron 25%
The Q2 standings tell a clear story of movement. Samsung reclaimed the top spot at 39%, its highest since 2024, while SK Hynix’s share fell to 26% from 39% a year earlier, and Micron climbed to 25%, its DRAM revenue up roughly fivefold from the prior year, per Counterpoint. China’s CXMT took 7%, growing faster than any supplier. The striking part is that SK Hynix lost share despite a 214% revenue jump, because in a market where everyone is growing, revenue growth alone does not defend position. Micron’s 25% DRAM share leaves it one point behind SK Hynix, with Samsung the clear leader. Data: Counterpoint Research Global Memory Tracker · Chart: FinanceFeeds. Counterpoint’s analysts tied SK Hynix’s slippage to its concentration in high-bandwidth memory. Research director MS Hwang noted that SK Hynix “grew slower than the competition as its market share declined with Samsung and Micron squeezing from both ends,” and analyst Neil Shah suggested Micron has a realistic shot at overtaking SK Hynix for second place. That is the fight the numbers now describe.What Contract Pricing Is Doing, and Who Sets It
Pricing is where the sector’s momentum is visibly fading, and the primary source for this class of number, TrendForce, lays out the deceleration quarter by quarter. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose roughly 90% to 95% quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2026, the steepest on record, then 58% to 63% in the second quarter. For the current quarter, TrendForce forecasts a far more moderate 13% to 18%, explicitly attributing the slowdown to weaker consumer demand and a high comparison base, and it sees the fourth quarter cooling further to 3% to 8%. DRAM contract-price increases have decelerated from a Q1 peak near 90% to a forecast in the low teens for the current quarter. Data: TrendForce · Chart: FinanceFeeds. So the widely repeated “prices up 50% this quarter” framing describes the quarter Micron just reported, not the one underway. The pricing power that lifted every memory maker is normalizing, which is exactly why the share and supply story is becoming the more important read than the headline price move.Investor Takeaway
The memory-price surge that lifted the whole sector is cooling, from a Q1 peak near 90% to a forecast of 13% to 18% this quarter per TrendForce, so the durable variable is no longer the price spike but which supplier gains and holds share, and Micron closing to one point behind SK Hynix is the clearest move.
Why HBM Changes the Economics Differently
The share shift is partly a story about product mix, and it cuts against the intuition that HBM is always the better business. SK Hynix built its lead on high-bandwidth memory, the premium DRAM stacked onto AI accelerators, but that concentration hurt it in Q2 when HBM3E prices fell year-on-year even as commodity DRAM prices climbed. TrendForce has flagged that conventional DDR5 profitability is set to surpass HBM3E as DDR5 prices rise and the two compete for the same wafer capacity, a reversal from the days when HBM commanded a premium more than four times DDR5. That rebalancing favors a more diversified DRAM book. Micron’s DRAM business, which makes up roughly three-quarters of its revenue, spans server DRAM, HBM and conventional memory, which is part of why its share held up while the HBM-heavy competitor gave ground. The same memory-cost inflation is rippling downstream into AI hardware, a dynamic FinanceFeeds tracked as Nvidia raised AI-server prices on memory costs, and it is the reason institutions have been positioning across the memory names, as covered in BlackRock’s semiconductor-stock positioning across Nvidia (NVDA), Micron (MU) and AMD.The Supply Side: Why Capacity Cannot Answer Quickly
The one thing keeping the whole market tight is that supply cannot respond on any useful timescale. Micron told investors on its most recent earnings call that it can fill only 50% to two-thirds of customer demand in the medium term and that industry demand for both DRAM and NAND will exceed supply beyond 2027. Across the big three, 2027 DRAM and HBM output is already largely sold out, with buyers locking in capacity through advance deposits and multi-year agreements. New capacity is slow and expensive to build. Fab construction runs on multi-year lead times, skilled-worker shortages and complex permitting, and meaningful new supply is not expected until late 2027 or 2028. That structural shortage is what turns a share gain into something potentially durable: if Micron can secure the capacity and the long-term contracts, the share it takes now is harder for rivals to claw back later. This is the memory rally FinanceFeeds covered when Samsung and SK Hynix rallied in Seoul on GPT-6, now viewed through the lens of who captures the constrained supply.What Micron’s Next Print Has to Show
For the share gain to look structural rather than a cyclical blip, Micron’s next quarterly report needs to show the pricing normalization is not eroding its momentum. The company guided fiscal fourth-quarter revenue to about $50 billion with a gross margin near 86%, extraordinary figures that bake in continued strength, so the market will watch whether it delivers and, more importantly, what it says about long-term supply agreements and capacity. The FinanceFeeds Micron $1,500 bull versus $560 bear scenario page frames how much of the case rests on that structural read. The signals to watch are concrete: whether Micron’s DRAM share holds or advances past SK Hynix’s 26%, whether its long-term agreements lock in the volume that defends the gain, and whether the pricing deceleration TrendForce forecasts stops at a high plateau or keeps falling. The rally has become a share fight, and the next print is where Micron shows whether it is winning it.Investor Takeaway
Micron’s fiscal fourth-quarter report is the checkpoint: the ~$50 billion revenue guide and roughly 86% margin set a high bar, so the durable question is whether the share gain to 25% holds as pricing cools, and whether long-term supply agreements convert this quarter’s momentum into a defensible position against SK Hynix.
