A favorable time of SSD: There are continuous deep price cuts of NAND

According to the latest data released by a market watcher, DRAMeXchange, the revenue of global NAND flash memory industry in the third quarter of 2018 reaches $17 billion, increased by 4.4% compared with last quarter. The prices of flash memory chip reduce by 10-15%.

    As the raising of 64/72-layer stacking 3D flash memory’s yield and productivity, the flash memory capacity shipped in the third quarter keeps increasing. Although the third quarter is peak season of smart phone and other electronic equipment, market damand is behind schedule, which is dragged down by reasons including the downturn of new gengeration iPhone and Sino US trade war, especially the shortage of Intel notebook CPU’s supply. 

    Therefore, NAND flash memory will continue oversupply in the forth quarter, price cutting may be larger. Flash memory manufacturers begin focusing on enterprise-class SSD market in this case, in order to get higher gross profit. As a flash gaint, Samsung’s third quarter revenue of flash memory industry reaches $6.05 billion, increased by 2.1% comparing with last quarter. Meanwhile, total shipment capacity increases by more than 20%, and average selling price is close to 15%.

    Due to market saturation, Samsung may slow down the renewal of flash memory processes in 2019, which means that the mainstream flash memory architecture is still 64/72-layer stacking in the coming year.