November 11 — Multiple sources within the storage industry have revealed that some leading companies have verbally notified channel merchants of their intention to raise prices for enterprise-grade NAND flash. Although formal price increase letters have yet to be issued, channel prices have already risen ahead of them. Several agents have confirmed the price increase signals. One SK Hynix agent remarked that "prices are going up every day," with rising recycling prices for second-hand drives continuing to push overall quotations higher. The price adjustment pathway works as follows: provincial agents adjust prices on a weekly basis, and these changes are then passed down level by level to agent product prices. However, one Samsung agent noted that this round is not a broad-based increase across all categories — the hikes are mainly concentrated in DRAM contract segments and enterprise-grade SSDs at both the original manufacturer and channel levels, while consumer-grade NAND has not fully followed suit. "The bulk of demand is still coming from computing power centers, and feedback from the grassroots level is actually average." Because the price increases are concentrated in DRAM contract segments and enterprise-grade SSD links, when prices ripple outward from original manufacturers, they first reach manufacturing companies and module makers rather than end consumers. As the first parties to absorb the original manufacturers' price increases, these manufacturers show marked differences in how they perceive and bear the pressure, owing to their different positions in the industry chain.