China looking into NAND/DRAM memory chip price fixing

As you all probably know by now, the pricing of DDR4 memory sticks and solid state disks increased significantly over the past year and a half as supply and demand are out of whack. Now news hits the wire that China's economic regulator is investigating the matter. Reuters reports officials are scrutinizing whether the high prices are the result of price fixing actions. The report points out Chinese officials believe the high prices may (partly) be caused by coordinated efforts:

“We have noticed the price surge and will pay more attention to future problems that may be caused by ‘price fixing’ in the sector,” the official Xu Xinyu was quoted as saying.

The newspaper added that the official referred to possible coordinated action taken by a number of firms to gain maximum profits by pushing the price of the product as high as possible.

China is one of world's largest consumer of memory chips as the country is world's biggest smartphone manufacturer.