The latest revenue ranking of global NAND Flash brand manufacturers

The latest revenue ranking of global NAND Flash brand manufacturers

Facing the most severe oversupply situation in 2023, the industry's price increased by nearly 10% in the fourth quarter.

TrendForce reports show that the NAND Flash industry's revenue grew significantly by 24.5% quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter of 2023, reaching $11.49 billion. This growth is attributed to the stable end-demand stimulated by year-end promotions, as well as the expansion of component market orders driven by price chasing, leading to a strong bit shipment compared to the same period last year. Furthermore, the continuous optimistic outlook for demand in 2024 by the enterprise sector, compared to 2023, and further strategic inventory building have driven this growth.

Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2024, although it is traditionally a slow season, the NAND Flash industry's revenue is expected to grow by another 20%. This expectation is based on the significant improvement in supply chain inventory levels and ongoing price increases, with customers increasing orders to avoid potential supply shortages and rising costs. The continued expansion of order sizes is expected to drive an average increase of 25% in NAND Flash contract prices.

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Samsung was the focus in the fourth quarter, mainly due to the sharp increase in demand for servers, notebooks, and smartphones, which propelled Samsung's significant growth. Despite not fully meeting customer orders, Samsung's bit shipments increased by 35% quarter-on-quarter, coupled with a 12% increase in average selling price, bringing its revenue to $4.2 billion, a significant increase of 44.8% quarter-on-quarter. SK Group lagged behind Samsung, with revenue growing by 33.1% to $2.48 billion due to a significant rebound in prices.

Western Digital's shipments slightly decreased by 2%, but the average selling price increased by 10%, leading to a 7% increase in NAND flash department revenue, reaching $1.67 billion. Due to the price rebound, retail SSD market shipments increased significantly, and inventory levels dropped to the lowest in four years. Driven by orders from PC and smartphone customers, Kioxia reported a slight increase in shipments in the fourth quarter, with revenue growing by 8% to $1.44 billion.

Facing the most severe oversupply situation in 2023, the industry's price increased by nearly 10% in the fourth quarter. However, Micron significantly reduced supply to improve profitability, leading to a more than 10% quarter-on-quarter decrease in bit shipments and a 1.1% decrease in revenue to $1.14 billion. In addition, Micron expects the NAND Flash demand bit growth to reach 15-20% this year, emphasizing the need for continuous capacity adjustments to achieve supply-demand balance and thus realize the industry's potential profitability.  Kioxia improves NAND flash capacity utilization According to Taiwan media Economic Daily, after the news of Kioxia's NAND capacity increase came out, executives of two downstream manufacturers Phison and ADATA expressed their views on this. According to previous reports, Kioxia said it would review its NAND flash production reduction strategy and increase its operating rate to 90% this month. Phison CEO Pan Jiancheng said that Phison is still out of stock. If the NAND flash original factory can provide stable supply at a reasonable price, it will be a good thing for Phison. In addition, the original factory's expansion can help the NAND market restore order: if the price of flash memory continues to rise, it will affect the demand of downstream manufacturers, and the increase in original factory capacity can stabilize the price. For each downstream manufacturer, the existing low-priced NAND inventory will always run out. If the price continues to rise, it will put pressure on the purchase cost. ADATA Chairman Chen Libai analyzed that Kioxia may still be in a loss-making state, so it is necessary to increase capacity utilization. However, even if the production capacity is increased this month, the increase in NAND shipments will have to wait until June, when the flash memory shipment price has risen to the profit line. Chen Libai said that ADATA still holds more than NT$20 billion (currently about RMB 4.56 billion) of low-priced NAND flash memory inventory.  Weak demand caps NAND price increases

According to the latest memory spot prices released by TrendForce, weak demand has capped the rise in NAND prices. Details are as follows:

DRAM spot market: In the spot market, since the end of the Spring Festival holiday, the demand momentum has not been sufficient to further push up prices. As a result, the overall transaction volume remains low. Due to the off-season, buyers are relatively passive, and component demand is lukewarm. As for chips, their prices are supported by sporadic transactions. The spot average price of mainstream chips (i.e., DDR4 1Gx8 2666MT/s) fell by 0.41% from $1.950 last week to $1.942 this week.

NAND flash spot market: This week, the NAND Flash spot market continued to be sluggish. Considering the extended sales days, sellers have been actively quoting and offering negotiation room to complete transactions, while buyers are unwilling to act due to the dissipation of urgent orders and sufficient inventory to meet corresponding demands. Overall, the increase in NAND Flash spot volume is limited, and the market remains sluggish. The 512Gb TLC wafer spot price rose by 4.28% this week, reaching $3.585.

Storage market warms up, HBM becomes the new favorite

While manufacturers are committed to reducing production and raising prices, they are also competing in the field of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). HBM is a new type of CPU/GPU memory chip, essentially a stack of many DDR chips packaged together with the GPU to achieve a high-capacity, high-bit-width DDR combination array. HBM can meet the high computational and storage demands of the era of large models. Therefore, HBM is gradually becoming the key force for storage industry giants to achieve performance reversal during market downturns.Recently, SK Hynix Vice President Kim Ki-tae stated that the company's HBM has been sold out for this year and preparations have already begun for 2025. Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra also disclosed that Micron's HBM production capacity for 2024 is expected to be fully booked.

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