Memory is still the story of the year

RAM has dominated every single session this month, and for good reason. Back on 3 June, week 21 RAM revenue was shown to be up almost 200% year on year, even as volumes started easing. By 17 June, memory was indexed at over 320 for the first half of the year, still sitting above 200. The enterprise server session then put a harder number on it: distribution invoice prices for RAM were running at over 550% of the index, a 600% increase year on year and 180% sequentially versus Q1. SSDs are following the same script, up over 200% year on year. None of this looks like it is close to finishing. The PriceWatch analysis on 24 June showed SSD prices climbing steadily since October 2025, with the UK sitting well above every other market and still rising, while Germany and France show early signs of levelling off. Notebooks are repeating the pattern with a delay of two or three months, and here it is Poland and France leading the charge upward.

Poland just keeps winning

If there is one country that has come up in every single forum this month, it is Poland. Servers up 100% in units in May. Workstation shipments spiking in week 20 on the back of public sector procurement. Large-format displays running above index from week one and pulling away further each week. Enterprise server activity showing triple-digit year-on-year growth thanks to a late release of EU funds unlocking delayed projects. The drivers are consistent across every presentation: European Recovery Plan money, education initiatives running through 2029, defence spending, and a slower-than-expected Windows 11 transition that is forcing hardware replacement. The point was also made on 24 June that this Polish strength is really an Eastern Europe story now, a reversal from the Western Europe dominance the LFD market saw for most of the last few quarters.

Spain's funding deadline is doing a lot of heavy lifting

The Spain update on 10 June was one of the standout presentations of the month. Revenue up 12% year to date, driven largely by companies racing to complete subsidised digital transformation projects before the next generation funds deadline at the end of August. Corporate resellers are up 24% year to date. Server computing, data centre networking and desktop computing are all growing well above index. The honest caveat, made openly in the session, is that nobody quite knows what happens once that August deadline passes and the digital kit scheme ends in October. The second half of the year is the real question mark for Spain, not the first.

Enterprise servers and storage are printing money

The server numbers presented on 17 June were genuinely striking. Dell posted $24.7 billion in a single quarter, up 181% year on year, with Lenovo and HPE also recording record profits from their server divisions. Backorders tell the same story: Dell alone is sitting on a $51.3 billion accelerated server pipeline. The storage session the same week made a strong case that hard disk drives are not being displaced by flash for high-capacity tiers, not because of nostalgia but because the economics simply do not work for all-flash at scale. The advice to partners was blunt: move enterprise accounts away from transactional buying, push higher-capacity drives to free up power headroom, and stop letting customers overpay for flash they do not need.

Consumer demand is the weak link

Business channels have held up well all year, but the consumer side tells a different story. May retail sellout data shown on 24 June had revenues down nearly 9% year on year and units down 17%, a sharp deterioration from a soft but not disastrous May 2025. Argentina's Q1 update on 3 June showed the same dynamic from a different angle: revenue down 20% and units down 26%, though that comparison is flattered by an exceptionally strong 2025 rebound quarter.

Worth watching beyond distribution

Two items sit outside the usual market data but matter for the industry. The forum covered the UK's new under-16 social media restrictions, part of a wider European trend including similar moves in Spain, France, Denmark and Greece, with device-level age verification likely to bring real technical requirements. There was also a sobering update on India, where forex reserves have dropped 6.5% since February amid measures to curb gold imports and outbound travel, alongside progress on CONTEXT's own India distributor panel, targeting an October 2026 launch.

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