Citrini’s view: AI demand has driven MLCC shipments from South Korea and Japan to a five-year high, as capacity shifts toward AI applications have led to a critical shortage of consumer-grade inventory.

Citrini analyst Jukan, citing TrendForce’s latest industry survey, noted that the three leading MLCC (multi-layer ceramic capacitor) manufacturers in South Korea and Japan posted their highest monthly shipments in five years in June: Murata hit 140 billion units, Samsung Electro-Mechanics 98 billion units, and Taiyo Yuden 40 billion units. The growth was mainly driven by strong AI demand, a trend that has continued into July. Cloud service providers’ procurement momentum for self-developed ASICs (such as Google TPU and AWS Trainium) remains robust, boosting demand for high-capacitance, low-voltage, small-sized MLCCs. However, AI-grade production capacity is diverting supply from consumer applications: South Korean and Japanese manufacturers are rapidly shifting their consumer-grade X5R MLCC production capacity to higher-spec X6S/X7R products for AI use, putting pressure on medium-to-high capacitance consumer MLCC (1µF to 22µF) capacity, with inventories of key products generally falling to 30 days or less. Jukan pointed out that supply tightness has triggered a knock-on effect, leading to a surge in distributors’ emergency orders. Order spillover has benefited Taiwanese and Chinese mainland suppliers, driving channel prices sharply higher: Distributors that stocked up in advance raised prices by an average of 20% to 25%, while spot market prices rose to two to three times their original levels. The market shows a structural divergence of “weak end demand but firm channel prices”: On one hand, consumer electronics remain sluggish due to factors like renewed inflation concerns from US-Iran geopolitical tensions and Apple’s recent price hikes for MacBook and iPad; on the other hand, AI bottlenecks are spreading from GPUs and memory to the smallest on-board components, with production capacity reallocation and channel scarcity being the main drivers of current price strength.