History 2002: Flash Card Market Will Rebound to $2.1 Billion in 2002

Web-Feet Research has released the 2002 version of Flash cards and removable storage forecast: 2002-2007.

The report finds the flash card market will rebound to $2.1 billion this year, recovering from the steepest drop in flash card revenues of $1.3 billion in 2001.

Although the picture for 2002 looks shaky in terms of the economy, the study still sees increasing demand rejuvenating the market. Flash card revenue is projected to grow from $1.31 billion in 2001 to $2.049 billion in 2002, or a 56.5% growth rate.

In 2007, the market revenue will be around $13.5 billion, which produces a CAGR of 60.1% over the forecast period (2002-2007). Non-flash removable storage (IBM Microdrives and the Matrix semiconductor OTP ROM cards) represents a smaller portion of the removable storage market segment. Total revenue for all removable storage markets will grow from $1.6 billion in 2001 to $2.5 billion in 2002, and to $14.5 billion by 2007, for a CAGR of 54.6%.

In 2002, the flash card market has seen a halting recovery, but the impact of the financial markets and political instability on consumer spending has dampened this recovery. Nevertheless, flash cards have become widely accepted by the digital imaging and music public.

Nowadays, when anyone is considering buying a camera, their first choice is usually a digital camera. Even Costco, like Sam’s Club, offers 128MB Compactflash, SmartMedia, and Memory Stick flash cards at less than $.50/MB.

This year, the USB drive became a hot item by capturing the floppy disk replacement market for PC and notebook users, and its new applications should establish the USB drive as another major flash card format.

During the summer, the 5C companies (SanDisk, Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, and Ingentix) established the Mobile Commerce (MC) standard that provides a secure digital content download system for wireless transactions. This standard paves the way for flash cards to be securely used in cell phones, PDAs, and other portable terminal devices, which will drive high growth in the flash card market.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 179 on December 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.