Increased Sales

 

Based on the strong demand of Solid State Drives (SSDs), Samsung and Micron increased their shares of the NAND flash memory market last year. On the other hand, Toshiba, which trailed Samsung Electronics at about 2 percentage points, was the only company showing a decline in sales and market share among the top four companies.

According the market research firm HIS on April 13, Samsung Electronics recorded US$9.084 billion (10.02 trillion won) in sales of NAND flash products, accounting for 36.5 percent share in the market last year. The company increased its sales by 4 percent from the previous year amid a 22.8 percent fall in average selling prices or ASPs per gigabit (GB) of NAND flash products. Its market share also grew 0.1 percentage points. 

Korean companies are taking over 50% of the market.Toshiba, which is the second-largest player in the NAND flash fragment, saw a drop in sales by nearly US$300 million (330.75 billion won). Its market share also decreased from 34.3 percent to 31.8 percent. The industry believes that Toshiba showed a rapid drop in sales as it lost its supply line to Apple in October last year after Apple issued a recall on all MacBook Air models containing Toshiba SSDs due to failures.  

As Micron, which showed the highest growth rate among top four companies, gained an 18.9 percent market share, it extended its lead to 6 percentage points with SK Hynix, the fourth-largest player in the market. Micron, which established a NAND joint venture IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) with Intel, is extending the market share based on its new client SSD M550 series, which was released last year.

The ASP of NAND flash products decreased by 28.4 percent last year, and it is also highly likely to be adjusted at the level of 20 percent this year. Even though NAND prices are continuously decreasing, Samsung Electronics and Micron showed an increase in the sales of NAND products. This is largely due to the relatively high unit prices of NAND products, which is used in SSDs. 

Companies which produce both NAND products and SSDs see higher profitability of SSDs when the prices of NAND products fall. The industry said that the margins of the SSDs of Samsung Electronics and Micron reach 30 to 40 percent. In addition, Samsung Electronics has started increasing the share of highly productive triple level cell (TLC) NAND products by more than half of the overall production from last year. 

The IHS believes that the SSD sales growth rate of Samsung Electronics last year would reach as much as 53.3 percent. The figure is the highest among the top five companies. Intel and Micron ranked 2nd and 3rd with 49.3 percent and 38.8 percent, respectively. In contrast, the sales estimate of Toshiba decreased 7.4 percent from the previous year.

Copyright © BusinessKorea. Prohibited from unauthorized reproduction and redistribution