Memory makers have spent the past year telling investors that the shortage will last longer than they said the quarter before. This page lines up what Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron said about memory supply on every earnings call from October 2024 to September 2026, one row per call, and draws the period each statement covered. It is a simple way to see how the length of the current memory cycle has been described, and then re-described, by the companies closest to it.
Through mid-2025 the calls described a recovery on a short clock. Samsung expected mobile and PC customers to keep cutting inventory until the first quarter of 2025 and to normalize in the second. SK hynix expected conditions to improve towards the second half of 2025, then said tariffs had made that second half harder to forecast. Tightness first showed up at the edges: Micron called leading-edge DRAM “very tight” in December 2024, and by mid-2025 all three were pointing to shortages of older products such as DDR4 as end-of-life plans left customers competing for the remaining supply.
The tone changed in the autumn of 2025. Micron said in September that it expected further DRAM tightness in 2026. In October, SK hynix said its DRAM and NAND capacity for 2026 was essentially sold out, and Samsung said customer demand for 2026 would exceed its supply. From there, each call pushed the end date further out. Samsung’s furthest stated date moved from the end of 2026 (October 2025) to 2027 (January 2026, in its NAND remarks) to “through 2028” (July 2026), two years further out across nine months of calls. Micron went from “beyond calendar 2026” in December 2025 and March 2026 to “beyond calendar 2027” in June 2026, and in September 2026 said conditions would be “much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028” than in 2026. SK hynix has not named a year since October 2025. It has described tight conditions “for the time being” and, in July 2026, “for a considerable period”, while discussing multi-year supply contracts with customers.
Since the shortage took hold in late 2025, none of the three has given a date for supply and demand returning to balance. Samsung says that beyond 2029 “it is hard to say”, and Micron says it does not have line of sight. The two dotted lines mark new capacity the companies have scheduled: the first Yongin cleanroom at SK hynix in early 2027, and first wafer output from Micron’s first Idaho fab in mid-2027. Both arrive inside the period the companies already describe as tight.
Collection method. The data was collected by an AI agent using the dfin.pro MCP. The agent located each statement in the companies’ earnings-call transcripts and compiled them here.
How to read the chart. Each row is one earnings call, placed at its call date. A solid bar runs to the end of the period the statement named: a named year is drawn to 31 December and a named quarter to the end of that quarter. An arrowhead means the company said “beyond” that date. A dashed arrow means the statement gave no end date; every dashed arrow stops at the same point purely for display. A dot alone means the statement gave no timing. Hover over a row for the full quote, the speaker and the timing wording; the table lists every quote with a link to its source.
Sources and interpretation. Quotes come from company earnings calls, using the call transcripts on dfin.pro. Samsung and SK hynix hold their calls in Korean, so their quotes are from the English interpretation; “[sic]” marks a word reproduced as interpreted. An ellipsis joins sentences from the same answer or remarks that were not adjacent.
Call dates. Dates are local call dates: Korea time for Samsung and SK hynix, and US Mountain time for Micron. The Korean calls take place on the previous evening in US time, so a few transcript pages show a date one day earlier than the chart. The chart uses the Korean date, checked against company releases and Korean press reports.
Samsung in January 2026. The bar runs to the end of 2027 because Samsung said supply growth would be constrained “in 2026 and 2027” in the NAND part of its answer. It described the broader shortage, across all products, as lasting “for the time being”.
Micron’s fiscal quarters. Micron’s fiscal year ends around the start of September, so its fiscal quarters do not line up with the Korean companies’ calendar quarters. The chart places every call at its date, so the three companies can be compared on one calendar.
Capacity dates. Neither company has given an exact date. The SK hynix Yongin cleanroom, described as opening in “early 2027” on its July 2026 call, is plotted at mid-February 2027. Micron’s Idaho first wafer output, guided to “mid-calendar 2027” on its December 2025 call and reaffirmed in September 2026, is plotted at 1 July 2027.
Coverage. Samsung Electronics: eight calls, October 2024 to July 2026. SK hynix: seven calls, January 2025 to July 2026. Micron: eight calls, December 2024 to September 2026. Samsung and SK hynix report the third quarter of 2026 in late October, and this page will be updated after those calls. Data as of 15 October 2026.