How do suppliers communicate these changes? Are they just like yep now it’s 3x higher? Im surprised you don’t have longer contracts

Longer contracts are riskier. The benefit of having cheaper RAM when prices spike is not strong enough to outweigh the downside of paying too much for RAM when prices drop or stay the same. If you’re paying a perpetual premium on the spot price to hedge, then your competitors will have pricing power over you and will slowly drive you out of the market. The payoff when the market turns in your favor just won’t be big enough and you might not survive as a business long enough to see it. There’s also counterparty risk, if you hit a big enough jackpot your upside is capped by what would make the supplier insolvent.

All your competitors are in the same boat, so consumers won’t have options. It’s much better to minimize the risk of blowing up by sticking as closely to spot at possible. That’s the whole idea of lean. Consumers and governments were mad about supply chains during the pandemic, but companies survived because they were lean.

In a sense this is the opposite risk profile of futures contracts in trading/portfolio management, even though they share some superficial similarities. Manufacturing businesses are fundamentally different from trading.

They certainly have contracts in place that cover goods already sold. They do a ton of preorders which is great since they get paid before they have to pay their suppliers. Just like airlines trade energy futures because they’ve sold the tickets long before they have to buy the jet fuel.

If you’re Apple, maybe that works, in this case we’re seeing 400% increases in price, instead of your RAM you’ll be delivered a note to pay up or you’ll get your money back with interest and termination fees and the supplier is still net positive.

> longer contracts

the risk is that such longer contracts would then lock you into a higher cost component for longer, if the price drops. Longer contracts only look good in hindsight if ram prices increased (unexpectedly).