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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-RAM-prices? dept.

The explosive growth in the NAND flash market may be slowing down:

After a blistering year-and-a-half long surge, a sudden drop in some memory prices, followed by Samsung Electronics Co's disappointing profit estimate, is causing jitters among investors who had bet the chip boom would last at least another year.

Amid news that the market has started losing some steam - prices of high-end flash memory chips, which are widely used in smartphones, dropped nearly 5 percent in the fourth quarter - some analysts now expect the industry's growth rate will fall by more than half this year to 30 percent.

That led shares in Samsung to dip 7.5 percent last week, while its home rival SK Hynix fell 6.2 percent. But analysts say that there is unlikely to be a sudden crash, and that 2018 should be a relatively stable year for chipmakers.

The $122 billion memory chip industry has enjoyed an unprecedented boom since mid-2016, expanding nearly 70 percent in 2017 alone thanks to robust growth of smartphones and cloud services that require more powerful chips that can store more data.

Previously: Samsung Set to Outpace Intel in Semiconductor Revenues
Chaos as Toshiba Tries to Sell Memory Business
IC Insights Predicts Additional 40% Increase in DRAM Prices
Expect 20-30% Cheaper NAND in Late 2018


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by EvilSS on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:13PM (5 children)

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:13PM (#623164)
    It's almost like a new technology surges in growth for a while then levels off as it becomes commonplace. Wonder if anyone's ever noticed this trend before. They could probably write a new textbook for investors and journalists explaining it to them!
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:47PM (2 children)

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:47PM (#623178)

    I for one, I am personally completely shocked that growth did not continue upwards perpetually, as was expected based on recent performance.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:06PM (#623200)

    True, but I at least wouldn't expect a drop yet. I am sure there are a lot of people like me who would have a lot more use for SSDs, but just aren't willing to pay the current prices.
    I.e. I don't think we are at the point where demand is leveling off but rather where demand is getting more tightly limited by cost (yes, demand is almost always relative to some cost, but I do think these scenarios can often be differentiated).

    • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:54AM

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:54AM (#623420)
      I would expect a drop in prices if the fabs over-estimated demand and overshot it with production capacity increases. Plus the smartphone market has leveled out, I'm sure the consumer SSD market has leveled out, and the enterprise market is still growing but SSD storage is quickly becoming standard fare for a lot of replacement projects so while that area is probably still hot it's not as hot as it was back in Q1 2017.

      Hopefully this is good news for anyone in the market for DDR memory. If the NAND market is starting to level off maybe they can move some production back to RAM because right now RAM prices are too damn high!