Samsung's NAND flash market share down slightly in Q1

Seoul: The share global NAND flash market for Samsung in the first quarter of the year dropped slightly compared to three months earlier, a report said on Monday, although the South Korean giant maintained dominance in the sector.

Samsung's revenue from NAND flash products came to a total of $4.5 billion in the first three months of 2020, up 1.1 per cent from a quarter earlier.

Samsung, also the leader in the DRAM sector, had a 33.3 per cent share of the global NAND flash market in terms of revenue in the January-March period, down 2.2 per cent from a quarter earlier, according to market tracker DRAMeXchange, a research division of TrendForce.

Japan's Kioxia Corp was second with 19 per cent, followed by US chipmakers Western Digital Corp (WDC) and Micron Technology Inc, with 15.3 per cent and 11.2 per cent, respectively.

"During the onset of COVID-19, Samsung registered lower than expected client solid-state drive (SSD) shipments because the outbreak kept ODMs from immediately resuming normal operations after the Lunar New Year holiday," DRAMeXchange said in a statement.

In addition, shipments of mobile memory/storage solutions also slowed down in the traditional off-season.

However, these two factors were offset by the strong demand for enterprise SSDs from the cloud services sector.

The global NAND flash revenue for the first quarter was up 8.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter to $13.6 billion, as demand for enterprise SSDs exceeded supply, report Yonhap.

For the current quarter, DRAMeXchange expected NAND flash makers to further increase their revenues.