Always faster, but above all always cheaper, could SSDs soon experience a certain “revaluation”?
While the main NAND memory manufacturers compete with announcements to highlight their most recent technical advances, we can sense that clouds are obscuring their horizon.
This is evidenced by the information relating to the increase in wafer prices from Samsung: when observers expected an increase of around 10%, it would rather be 20%.
A year of “readjustment”?
Such an increase will obviously not do the business of manufacturers of devices using the famous NAND memory, the first of which are the creators of smartphones and SSDs.
The latter probably did not need such news when their sales have declined significantly throughout the last two years. For 2023, we will have to wait a few more months before having quantified data, but TrendForce publishes the 2022 results. It’s not famous.
Knowing that 2020 and 2021 were years marked by a fairly remarkable increase in sales linked to the explosion of teleworking and a very clear need to equip oneself, the drop in 2022 is not surprising.
114 million SSDs sold
The fact remains that for industrialists often working at almost tight pace, the fall is painful. In fact, we are not talking here about a drop of a few thousand units.
Between 2021 and 2022, global sales of SSDs therefore fell from 127 million to 114 million units, a fall of 10.7% year-on-year after an increase of 11% observed over the whole of 2021. Such a fall will inevitably have repercussions and the increase in the cost of NAND wafers is not likely to improve things.
Market shares of SSD vendors in 2021 and 2022 © TrendForce
In detail and without knowing how each manufacturer is affected, we see that Kingston retains – by far – its first place with 28% market share. The company was only at 26% in 2021. Behind, we still find ADATA which goes from 8 to 9% market share, but in third place, it is Lexar which imposes itself on Kimtigo although both have an 8% market share.
Although the data published by TrendForce is incomplete, one of the main losers seems to be Transcend which goes from 5 to 3% market share in a context of general decline.
Source : TrendForce
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