RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs
To illustrate the severity of the current memory shortage, Karen Parkhill, HP Inc.’s chief financial officer, said RAM represented “about 15 to 18 percent” of HP’s PC bill of materials in its fourth fiscal quarter 2025 to “about 35 percent” for the rest of the year.
Parkhill was speaking during HP’s first-quarter 2026 earnings conference call, during which the company said it expects the total addressable market for its Personal Systems business to decline by double digits this calendar year as higher prices hurt customer demand.
“We’ve seen a sequential increase in memory costs of approximately 100 percent, and we expect that to increase further as we move forward in the fiscal year,” Parkhill said, according to a transcript of the call from Seeking Alpha.
HP expects its finances to be most severely impacted by the RAM shortage in the second half of its fiscal year.
“We are seeing an increase in input costs, primarily driven by rising prices for DRAM and NAND,” said Bruce Broussard, CEO and interim head of HP. “We expect this volatility to persist throughout the financial year [year 2026] and probably in tax matters [year 2027].”
RAM shortage leads to higher prices and lower specifications
HP’s CFO noted that a third of the margin in HP’s Personal Systems business comes from non-RAM categories, including IT services and peripherals. However, HP has also increased PC prices to continue making money while paying significantly more for RAM.
