History (1998): SanDisk in Front of $375 Million Flash Card Market

A market research study from Semico Research (Phoenix, AZ) cited per SanDisk found that the WW flash card market increased by 30% from 1996 to 1997 in term of revenue.

“The flash card market grew substantially, increasing from $288 million in 1996 to $375 million in 1997. We are forecasting WW flash card sales of $701 million this year, $2.4 billion in the year 2000 and $4.4 billion in 2002,” said Alan Niebel, director of non-volatile IDC report memory for Semico.

Niebel attributed much of the increase to the growing demand in consumer applications such as digital cameras, handheld computers and audio digital recorders.

He said: “The consumer market accounted for 28% of total WW shipments in 1997 but we expect such shipments to escalate at a rapid rate and rise to a significant 55% by 2002. Unit demand for flash cards in the EDP, industrial and communications markets continues to be relatively strong.”

Following Sandisk’s 28% revenue market leader were last year Hitachi (15%), Toshiba (10%), PNY (6.1%), Intel (5.9%) and Samsung (5.6%). All other companies has less than 5% revenue market share.

SanDisk shipped 1.5 million cards in 1997, which represent a 40% share of the 3.75 million cards shipped WW in 1997, according to Semico who adds that total shipments include 2.4 million small size memory cards (1.3 million of which are CompactFlash cards), and 1.35 million Type I, II and III flash PC cards.

The study, covering 23 flash memory card makers, concluded that most card sales were made in the Americas with 57% of all dollar sales in 1997. Japan ranked second with sales of 22%. AsiaPac region “is forecasted to register the highest growth, rising from 1% in 1997 to 13.5% in just 5 years.”