Serenity intensifies its bullish stance on Macronix: DDR3 price hikes have far exceeded sell-side expectations, average selling price (ASP) revised up to double sequentially, and operating leverage is fully unlocked.

Serenity published a report analyzing the sell-side research on ESMT (Jinghao Ke, stock code 3006). In March, South China Securities projected ESMT’s Q2 DDR3 4Gb contract price would rise around 50% quarter-on-quarter, while Fubon Securities forecast DRAM prices would increase 40% quarter-on-quarter. By August, South China Securities had revised ESMT’s Q2 aggregate ASP upward to a 105% to 113% quarter-on-quarter rise, explicitly stating DDR3’s price increase was “significantly better than expected”. Serenity argues that the price hike in niche memory chips is no longer just a revenue story, but a major profit amplifier, with operating leverage stretched to an extreme. Powerchip’s wafer costs may double in the second half of the year, and customers’ willingness to absorb cost pass-through has far exceeded expectations. ESMT’s single-month net profit in July was around $109 million, far exceeding earlier model assumptions. Roughly annualized, this values the stock at as low as a 1.9x P/E ratio. DDR3 is mainly used in products like IP cameras and hard drives. Memory chips account for a very small share of customers’ total bill of materials (BOM), so even a few dollars more per chip is far cheaper than the cost of redesigning and re-certifying products, making demand relatively inelastic. The consensus view is that peers are shifting production capacity to high-value products like HBM and DDR5, leading to structural tightening in DDR3 and DDR2 supply.