Price-freeze announcements are usually the least interesting thing a hardware company can put out. Kramer’s is worth reading anyway — not for what it covers, but for what it deliberately leaves out.
The pro AV manufacturer has committed to two things through the remainder of 2026: holding current pricing across the vast majority of its product portfolio, and investing in deeper inventory across key product families to improve availability and speed up project delivery. For integrators quoting jobs that won’t be installed for six or nine months, that’s a genuinely useful piece of certainty in a market that has offered very little of it.
The exception that tells the story
PC-based products are carved out. That means VIA collaboration devices, Control Brains and Management devices don’t get the price guarantee — because, as Kramer puts it, processors, memory, operating system licensing and other computing components remain too volatile to underwrite.
Read that carve-out closely and it’s a fairly blunt statement about the state of the component market. Kramer is comfortable enough with its supply of switchers, extenders and signal management hardware to lock in prices for roughly half a year. It is not comfortable doing the same for anything with a CPU and RAM inside. Memory pricing in particular has been on a tear as AI datacentre demand hoovers up supply, and it’s the smaller-volume buyers — AV manufacturers among them — who get squeezed hardest when hyperscalers are in the market.
Kramer CEO Gilad Yron accompanied the announcement with commentary on the broader semiconductor market, arguing supply chain volatility is likely to persist for at least another year. That’s a notably unhedged forecast from a vendor — and it doubles as the justification for why the freeze has a boundary around it.
Why it matters
Pro AV lives on long project cycles. A university auditorium or corporate campus fit-out gets specified, budgeted and tendered months before anything ships, and integrators eat the difference when list prices move underneath a quote. Several manufacturers have pushed through multiple increases since 2021; a vendor voluntarily pinning prices for the rest of a year is partly a supply chain statement and partly a channel loyalty play.
It’s also worth keeping expectations calibrated. “The vast majority of the portfolio” is doing some work in that sentence, and Kramer hasn’t published a line-by-line list of what qualifies. Nor has it quantified the inventory investment, which makes the availability half of the commitment harder to hold anyone to than the pricing half. Integrators will find out which is which the first time they need forty units of something in a hurry.
Still, in a year where most component news has been about things getting scarcer and dearer, a vendor going on record with a ceiling is a reasonable thing to bank.
