Korea's DRAM module exports in the first eleven days of August were 4% of July's monthly total

In what Korea sold abroad over the first eleven days of August, chips and the goods built from those chips moved at different speeds. Split by product, the preliminary customs data shows $4.62 billion of DRAM and $780 million of NAND leaving the country. DRAM modules, by contrast, came to $330 million and SSDs to $490 million. A DRAM module is a row of DRAM chips mounted on a thin board, the stick you push into a computer. An SSD is a storage device built by tying a number of NAND chips together.

Eleven days is about 35% of a month. Hold that line up against each product and it is immediately clear which ones kept pace and which stopped.

Where the pace split

The same data also shows each product's 1-11 August total as a percentage of its full July total. NAND came in at 44% and DRAM at 34%, keeping or beating the monthly run rate. MCP at 21% and SSDs at 11% fell behind, and modules were at 4%. MCP is a package with DRAM and NAND stacked into a single part, used mostly in phones. The headline figure customs published separately points the same way.

Exports up 45.3% in first 10 days of August on chips (The Korea Herald, 2026-08-11)

출처: koreaherald.com

If the total is at a record while modules sit at 4%, the story is not that the goods are missing but that they went somewhere else.

What Apacer's chief executive said about 2027

That module makers cannot get chips had already been said out loud in the industry. On 29 July, C.K. Chang, chief executive of the Taiwanese module maker Apacer, said the DRAM volume reaching module makers in 2027 could fall to around 30% of this year's level. His reason was that manufacturers are serving HBM, server DRAM and the volumes large AI and cloud customers buy directly, before anyone else. An estimate that about 60% of DRAM capacity now goes to server applications came with it.

DRAM chip supply to module makers could drop by more than 70% in 2027 (Tom's Hardware, 2026-07-29)

출처: tomshardware.com

Put simply, there is plenty of flour and none of it is reaching the bakery. The mill is serving its large accounts first, and the neighbourhood shop waits. The first eleven days of August are where that story finally shows up large in the statistics. Eleven days is short, though, and shipments bunching up or slipping can produce a gap this size on their own. If module exports in the confirmed August data due in mid-September come in below half of July's, the allocation really has moved; if they clear half, the early-month hole was a shipping-timing effect. When memory prices are rising, the profits of the side making the chips and the side buying them to assemble do not move in the same direction.