The entire past six months, according to TrendForce analysts, was characterized by a decrease in demand for NAND flash memory, and contract prices fell by 20-25%. In the enterprise SSD segment, the price reduction reached 28%. In the fourth quarter, revenue from NAND memory vendors fell sequentially by 25% to $10.29 billion.
Image Source: Samsung Electronics
Interestingly, actual shipments rose by 5.3%, but still average selling prices fell by 22.8%, as customers were not willing to enter into contracts for the supply of flash memory, even at reduced prices, for fear of overstocking their own warehouses. According to TrendForce, Kioxia and Micron experienced both lower flash memory production volumes and lower prices last quarter. Low demand for memory chips in the PC and smartphone segment led to a 30.5% decline in Kioxia’s revenue, while in the server segment, customers tried to get rid of excess memory in warehouses. Nevertheless, in the second quarter, Kioxia retained its status as the second largest memory manufacturer after Samsung with a market share of 19.1% in monetary terms.
Directly, Samsung Electronics’ revenue from the sale of flash memory consistently decreased by 19.1% to $3.5 billion, but the Korean giant still remains the market leader with a 33.8% share, which even increased by 2.4% in the fourth quarter. item. The company is not going to follow the example of smaller competitors to reduce the production of NAND chips or refuse to invest in expanding production capacity. In the future, this will help it achieve cost savings and maintain technological leadership.
Image Source: TrendForce
In third place in the ranking of the largest NAND vendors in terms of revenue was SK Group, combining the results of SK hynix and Solidigm, the company that operates the former Intel facility in Dalian, China. The group’s revenue fell sequentially by 30.9% to $1.76 billion, and its market share fell from 18.5% to 17.1%. At the same time, the actual volumes of product deliveries increased by 6.7%.
Of particular note are Western Digital Corporation, which, in a challenging market environment, was able to not only contain a 3.8% decline in revenue, but also increase its market share from 12.6% to 16.1% in just one quarter. This was facilitated by a 20% increase in the supply of products, although the price reduction inevitably led to a drop in revenue by 3.8%. At least, it turned out to be minimal among all participants in the TrendForce rating.
Micron had to cap its revenue of $1.1 billion, which was 34.7% lower than in the third quarter, and the degree of utilization of the company’s enterprises also fell. That didn’t stop Micron from shipping 232-layer 3D NAND in solid state drives to the customer market in the fourth quarter. The company should demonstrate growth in the volume of product deliveries in the near future.
According to TrendForce, Kioxia, Micron, WDC and SK hynix will cut memory production volumes in the first quarter. This will lead to a gradual decrease in the average selling price of memory chips by 10–15%. The first quarter is traditionally characterized by low buyer activity, so industry revenue could decline sequentially by 8.1%.
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