Follow the Weekly IT Industry Forum for a month and one story dominates everything else: memory. Not AI, not tariffs, not even the World Cup, though all three got airtime. Every country update, vertical breakdown, and category deep dive eventually circled back to the same fact. RAM, storage, and the chips that hold them are being repriced in real time, and almost nobody downstream of the fabs has any control over it.

The memory supercycle has a name: HBM

Start with the numbers that made headlines outside the channel too. SK Hynix listed on Wall Street on 10 July in what was described as the largest initial share sale by a foreign company in US market history. The offering was seven times oversubscribed and the stock gained 13 to 14% on day one. The reason is high bandwidth memory (HBM), the component every AI training cluster needs and SK Hynix currently has an early lead in supplying to buyers like Nvidia. The company is ploughing the proceeds into factory expansion, including its first US production facility in Indiana.

Samsung's Q2 numbers landed the same week and they were startling: profit up around 1,810% year over year to roughly $58 billion, with margins on the memory division exceeding 70%. The stock still fell 6% after the announcement, because investors are now asking whether memory chip pricing has already peaked. Samsung is fast-tracking a new semiconductor plant to bring capacity forward from its original 2029 schedule. Meanwhile Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are facing a class action antitrust suit in a California federal court over alleged price fixing.

Then, three weeks later, a new entrant. CXMT, a Chinese chipmaker, floated on Shanghai's Star Market in what was called Asia's largest IPO of the year. The stock jumped close to 470% on its first day, giving the company a market capitalisation of around $487 billion. CXMT is targeting 350,000 wafers a month, putting it roughly on a par with Micron and pushing China into second place behind South Korea for DRAM production. Standard commercial channels may see a split: Chinese suppliers offering commodity DRAM while Korean giants focus on premium HBM for AI workloads.

ASML, Europe's most valuable company and the sole global manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, reported earnings above guidance and raised its FY2026 outlook. This serves as a clear reminder of where the real chokepoint in the supply chain sits.

None of this stayed abstract for long. In Germany, factories are reallocating capacity from consumer DDR5 memory to HBM, and vendors are telling resellers to expect elevated prices through 2027. RAM pricing in wider channel data ran at 488% year on year in May and 506% in June. Server average selling prices in Italy were up 179% in Q2, SSDs up 141%, and memory itself up over 300%. Component pricing is now the single biggest driver of IT distribution revenue across Europe.

Storage: the same story, told through gigabytes

Antonio Talia's storage session laid out just how far this has gone. HDD revenue across Europe was up 40% year on year in Q1 and an early 17% in Q2, with Poland posting 72% Q1 growth, driven by hyperscaler expansion from Microsoft and Google. Spain's HDD revenue grew 98% in Q1 on NAS devices and a 250% surge in the AV segment.

Internal SSDs told an even sharper story. Data centre SSD revenue rose 124% year on year in Q1 and an extraordinary 451% in early Q2, taking 55% of the internal SSD market. Consumer SSDs went the other way: up 12% in Q1, down 6% in early Q2, with unit volumes falling 55%. The average price per gigabyte for data centre SSDs has surged more than 200% since late 2025, while consumer pricing per gigabyte is up closer to 100%. HDD remains the preferred option for bulk storage precisely because of that gap. Revenue is rising much faster than volume everywhere, proving price, not demand, is doing the work.

Apple learns what happens when you pass the cost on

Apple's MacBook Neo became a useful case study in pricing power under cost pressure. Tim Cook announced a roughly 15% price rise on iPads and MacBooks, citing AI industry demand for chips, putting the MacBook Neo up £100 in the UK. Apple shares dropped about 6% immediately after before recovering within days.

Weekly MacBook Neo unit sales dropped to their lowest point yet in weeks 26 and 27, right when the price increase started to feed through. Then week 28 showed a sharp bounce back in units even as prices stayed higher. By late July, Apple's overall unit growth ran close to 57%, revenue was up around 30%, and the Neo accounted for 37% of that growth. Apple's consumer notebook market share climbed from around 11% to 18% since launch.

Country divides across Europe and beyond

Poland defined the narrative, sitting well above every other market with June growth touching 51% across all sectors, backed by EU funding and data centre builds. Germany represented the counter-example, with Q1 GDP growth at 0.3% and full-year forecasts between 0.6% and 0.9%. Trade tariffs, energy costs, and business climate contractions pushed German companies toward precautionary savings. Still, its IT sector remains a standout, forecast to grow 4.1% to €245 billion, supported by a €500 billion infrastructure fund and €5 billion for DigitalPakt 2.0.

France turned underperformance into high growth through June, driven partly by a March 31 compliance deadline for the EU DORA regulation. Spain is cooling off as initial hyperscaler data centre construction matures, though work has begun on a new €3 billion, 100MW renewable AI facility in Granada. Italy returned to 9% growth in Q2 through business channels. Across Latin America, Brazil grew through volume (+17%) rather than value (+0.1%), supported by gov.br serving 166 million users. Mexico and Colombia saw desktop imports rebound sharply in Q1 2026, up 43% and over 40% respectively.

Category threads worth remembering

Desktops refused to die, outperforming expectations across multiple countries because they remain cheaper to buy and easier to upgrade than notebooks. The share of desktops shipping with powerful 40+ TOPS AI NPUs jumped from 1 to 2% up to 9% in a single quarter. Printing continues its structural shift, with cartridge-based capacity down 41% since 2022 while refillable ink bottle capacity rose 28%. Gaming peripherals thrived as budget-conscious buyers upgraded mice and headsets rather than full PCs. Finally, the ChannelWatch survey of over 7,000 respondents revealed client readiness for AI fell from over a third in 2024 to under 10% in 2025, reflecting the hard reality of deploying AI into legacy systems.

What this month actually tells you

Strip away individual country slides and one reality is clear. Every part of this industry currently operates inside a cost structure set by a small group of memory fabricators. Revenue is up almost everywhere, but unit volumes in most categories are flat or falling. That is price inflation working, not underlying market growth, and it is the critical detail to remember whenever a channel update opens with impressive percentage gains.

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