NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Flash fumbles as industry revenues fall 2.3 % in Q4
The NAND Flash industry is fumbling a bit, with revenues of just $8.307 billion reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015. That might sound like a lot, but it’s five percent less than one year ago, and also 2.3 percent less than the industry raked in during the third quarter of 2015.
Stifel Nicolaus managing director Aaron Rakers said in DRAMeXchange that the numbers suggest the market is being hit by over-supply, as storage systems makers scramble to keep up with enterprise world that’s ditching traditional disk-based storage in droves.
Some vendors did okay though. For example, market leader Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. saw its flash revenues jump by 4.2 percent from the third to the fourth quarter, to $2.79 billion. The Korean firm boasts a 33.6 percent market share, rising from its 31.5 percent share in the quarter before.
It was a different story at number two player Toshiba Corp. however, which saw its revenues fall by 11 percent to just $1.55 billion in the last quarter, and down 19 percent year-on-year.
Elsewhere, third-ranked SanDisk Corp. only managed to grow its revenues by one percent in the last quarter, while Micron Technology Inc. saw revenues tumble by two percent in the same period, and three percent annually. Last but not least, SK hynix Inc. saw flash revenues drop by nine percent in the last quarter and 16 percent year-on-year.
In total, flash revenues for 2015 hit $33.1 billion. That’s higher than the $32.2 billion the industry scoffed in 2014, and the $29.1 billion it reached in 2013, but still it’s not great news. The flash industry is growing slowly, and that’s not good for vendors, according to Stifel Nicolaus’ Rakers.
A second problem the industry faces is that flash manufacturers are encountering problems as they try to improve their technologies, according to DRAMeXchange research director Sean Yang.
“Besides facing rapidly falling prices, the manufacturers have also reached a bottleneck in their process technology migration,” Yang said. “Memory makers that are developing or producing 3D-NAND flash are encountering yield rate issues, with Samsung being the sole exception.”
Photo Credit: Rusty Russ via Compfight cc
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