Methodology

A reference, not a forecast.

The European IT Hardware Price Index is designed as a transparent, reproducible benchmark — neither a market forecast nor an investment instrument. It exists to give procurement officers, suppliers and policymakers a common factual basis when negotiating contracts in volatile markets.

§ 01 — Principles

Four design commitments

Independent reference

Published by a neutral European body (Eurostat in cooperation with DG CONNECT) and freely accessible to all market participants.

Disaggregated by class

Separate series for DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, HDD / SSD / NVMe storage, server CPUs, and GPUs / AI accelerators — not a single composite.

Spot-market based

Monthly arithmetic mean of EU retail and B2B distributor prices, ex VAT, weighted by procurement volume from a representative panel.

Base period 100

All series normalised to 100 = January 2023, allowing direct year-on-year comparison across categories.

§ 02 — Data sources

Where the numbers come from

Distributor panel
Aggregated B2B price feeds from EU IT distributors covering 12 member states.
Spot market trackers
Public TrendForce and DRAMeXchange monthly contract spot prices.
Retail aggregators
Geizhals, PCPartPicker EU and Idealo for retail-level reference points.
Hyperscaler tenders
Anonymised disclosures from large EU public-sector framework awards.

§ 03 — Update cadence

Monthly cycle

T-30 days
Data collection from distributor panel and public spot feeds.
T-7 days
Validation, outlier removal, currency normalisation to EUR.
T-0
Index publication on the first business day of the month.
T+5 days
Annexed dataset and methodology notes released for public review.

§ 04 — Contractual application

From benchmark to contract clause

The index is intended to be referenced directly within procurement frameworks. Two worked examples follow.

Example A · Threshold trigger

"Where the EU-IT-HPI for the relevant component class moves by more than +20% between the bid date and the delivery date, the supplier may submit a price-revision request limited to the measured index movement."

Example B · Symmetric pass-through

"Final invoice unit prices shall be adjusted by the percentage change of the EU-IT-HPI sub-index for the relevant component category, applied symmetrically for both increases and decreases above a ±10% materiality threshold."

Notice

A reference dataset

The figures published on this site are a curated reference dataset prepared to illustrate the proposed index. They are based on public spot-market aggregates and are intended for policy discussion, not for binding commercial use. A formally governed European publication would require validation by the relevant EU body.