TrendFocus: NAND Wafer Output by Vendor and Technology

TrendFocus, Inc., a U.S. market research and consulting firm on HDDs, has added a new service on NAND/SSDs.

It just published a report, NAND/SSD Information Service Preview, on wafer output shipments by vendor and NAND shipments by technology. Below is an abstract.

        NAND Wafer Shipments and Market Share

  (Source: TrendFocus)

NAND suppliers have been conservative in ramping capacity in 2012 as most companies feared an over-supply situation in fabs that were built in 2010 and 2011. Micron’s Singapore Fab (IMFS) and Samsung’s Fab16 started mass production in mid-2011 while Toshiba and SanDisk’s Fab 5 in Yokkaichi, Japan began ramping up production in the second half of 2011 (SK Hynix was an exception, foregoing new fab construction due to tight CAPEX spending). Nearly all suppliers have scaled back new phases of expansions into the newly-built fabs, waiting for demand to accelerate once again before committing to additional output.

                   NAND Shipments by Technology

  (Source: TrendFocus)

MLC output continues to dominate NAND output, while SLC slowly declines in NAND market share, servicing primarily high-end enterprise applications. Three-bit-per-cell (TLC) NAND share is holding steady as the applications for TLC are limited mainly to flash cards and USB flash drives. FAB expansion in NAND is compulsory as economies of scale plays a major role in bringing down the price for $/GB. The recent $7 billion investment announcement by Samsung to build a Fab in Xian, China is an example of a strategic move to take a lead in this industry in both scale and cost reductions. As NAND $/GB continues to drop at an average 30% ~ 60% annually, it opens up new opportunities to penetrate the data storage industry through a variety of client and enterprise solutions.