NAND flash prices have declined by 50% so far this year due mainly to capacity expansions among major suppliers worldwide, and the prices are expected to drop further in 2019, when more capacities are available, with more than half of upstream NAND makers likely to face increasing pressure to stay profitable, according to industry sources.

Simon Chen, chairman of Adata Technology, a Taiwan maker of DRAM modules and NAND flash chips, said that globally leading NAND flash makers have yet to slow down capacity expansions, and prices may see a larger drop in 2019 than in 2018.

Industry sources said that there are now 6-7 leading makers of NAND flash products around the world, all devoted to developing new-generation production processes. Among them, Samsung, Toshiba Memory/Western Digital, Mircon/Intel and SK Hynix have released their respective 96-layer 3D NAND technologies for volume production in the first half of 2019.

All these makers are actively building new production capacities for 96-layer 3D NAND chips at a pace of 50,000-100,000 pieces per month, and China's Yangtze Memory Technology is also ramping up its NAND flash production capacity to a maximum monthly level of 150,000 pieces. The resultant oversupply is expected to send NAND flash prices falling further in 2019, the sources indicated.

In contrast, DRAM prices are likely to stay flat in 2019, Adata's Chen said, reasoning that the world's top-3 DRAM makers Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron will have only slight capacity expansions in 2019 despite expected increases in demand from the sectors of datacenters, gaming devices, IoT and in-vehicle systems.

By: DocMemory
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