Kingston, ADATA, and Tigo are the top three branded SSD module makers says TrendForce.

SSD products in the channel market recorded a total of 55 million units in 2017, which represented a decrease of 3-4% compared with 2016 shipments.

The total annual shipments from all branded NAND Flash manufacturers (including Samsung, Toshiba, WDC, Micron, SK Hynix, Intel and so on) fell by nearly 10% YoY in 2017, whereas the total annual SSD shipments from all memory module makers grew by 2-3% YoY for the same year.

Branded NAND Flash manufacturers jointly accounted for 40% of the global SSD shipments for 2017, while the other 60% was contributed by memory module makers.

The changing landscape in the market is due to the undersupply of NAND Flash in 1H17, which was not eased until 2H17. Faced with the tight supply, the NAND Flash manufacturers made adjustments to their SSD product mixes and allocated more capacity to PC OEM and Server/Data Center OEM sectors, where the gross margins are higher.

Chinese companies tend to be aggressive. Teclast, Galaxy, Colorful, and Sunspeed retained their advantages in the gaming sector and continued to explore the channel market in China. In addition, they have outsourced assembly to reduce the production costs.

BIWIN, the leading module maker in China, was not in the top 10 ranking because it puts more focuses on the OEM and industrial SSD sectors rather than the channel market.

Longsys was not included in this ranking either, because its business is mainly OEM orders from branded Chinese memory companies, which does not meet the criteria of this ranking. Nevertheless, its OEM shipments are comparable to the top 10 SSD module makers.

By: DocMemory
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