Chinese Companies Increasing Their Presence in Global SSD Market

Chinese companies are exercising ever growing influence on the global consumer solid-state drive (SSD) market. While Korean companies, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, focused on business-to-business (B2B) market, such as profitable enterprise servers, Chinese and Taiwanese companies rapidly secured the global consumer SSD market.

SSD is a device that stores digital information using NAND flash semiconductors, and recently, it has been rapidly replacing hard disk drives (HDDs) in the PC and portable storage device market.

According to a recent industry trend report by DRAMeXchange, a global market research firm, the worldwide shipments of SSD products for regular consumers in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market amounted to 55 million units last year. This is 3% to 4% less than the shipments of the previous year.

When analyzed by company, the SSD shipments of NAND flash manufacturers, such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, WDC, Micron and Intel, decreased by 10% from the previous year. On the other hand, shipments from SSD module manufacturers increased by 2% to 3% during the same period.

As a result, NAND flash manufacturers accounted for 40% of the total SSD shipments worldwide last year, while module manufacturers accounted for the remaining 60%.

NAND flash manufacturers seem to have focused on relatively profitable original equipment manufacturing (OEM) for servers and data centers in the continuous market boom. On the other hand, the Chinese module manufacturers took up a considerable share of the market demand, sources analyze.

In last year’s shipment ranking of SSD module manufacturers, excluding NAND flash manufacturers, 8 out of top 10 companies were either Chinese or Taiwanese companies. While Taiwanese companies concentrated on profitability, Chinese companies focused on market share and enhancement of their name value, showing strategic differences.

DRAMeXchange prospected, "Chinese companies are outsourcing SSD production to lower the production costs. Given the low prices and the abundant supply of NAND flash this year, Chinese companies have a high chance of further increasing their market share.”