Overwhelming Leader

Samsung electronics ranked first in the global NAND flash market share with 33.6 percent in Q4, 2015.
Samsung electronics ranked first in the global NAND flash market share with 33.6 percent in Q4, 2015.

 

Samsung electronics continued to sit on the throne of the world's NAND flash market in the fourth quarter of 2015, expanding the gap with other smaller rivals around the globe.

According to the data from industry tracker DRAMeXchange on March 6, the South Korean tech giant ranked first in the NAND flash market share with 33.6 percent in the October-December period, followed by Japan's Toshiba Corp. with 18.6 percent, U.S.-based SanDisk Corp. with 15.8 percent, U.S.-based Micron Technology Inc. with 13.9 percent, SK Hynix Inc. with 10.1 percent and U.S.-based Intel Corp. with 8 percent.

Samsung’s market share is almost double the figure of Toshiba, which introduced the NAND flash technology in 1989.

In the third quarter in 2015, Samsung accounted for 31.5 percent of the market, and Toshiba held 20.5 percent, showing the gap of 11 percent point. However, Samsung’s sales grew 4.2 percent from the previous quarter in the fourth quarter, while Toshiba saw its rapid drop by 11.3 percent, expanding the gap.

A NAND flash memory chip is one of the two prominent semiconductor memories, along with DRAM, and it is expected to exceed DRAM in the market size shortly.

In the market view report, DRAMeXchange said, “The NAND flash market showed a minus growth of 2.3 percent due to the depression in the mobile demand industry. However, Samsung was one of the few manufacturers that experienced revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2015. Other competitors are now facing pressures of the fall in unit prices and technology advance bottlenecks.”

Samsung used a NAND flash-based 14nm embedded Multi-Media Card (eMMC) and embedded Multi Chip Package (eMCP) in its new flagship Galaxy S7 series smartphone, which were released last month. 

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