SSD prices to fall further by the summer
NAND flash manufacturers already lost ground at the end of 2024. Things are set to go even further downhill in the coming months.
(Image: c't)
Manufacturers of NAND flash, for example for SSDs and smartphones, sold components worth a good 16.5 billion US dollars in the fourth quarter of 2024 – a decline of around 6.2% compared to the previous quarter. Prices and thus sales are expected to fall further by the summer.
The biggest losers are the memory giants Samsung (-9.7 percent), SK Hynix (-6.6 percent) and Micron (-9.3 percent). The manufacturers themselves typically do not state how much money they make exclusively from NAND flash. The figures are estimated by market observer Trendforce. Although Samsung's sales suffered the most, the company remains by far the largest NAND flash supplier with revenues of 5.6 billion US dollars.
Trendforce estimates that sales of NAND flash components will fall by a further 20 percent in the current first quarter of 2025. That would still be a good 13 billion US dollars. In the second quarter, prices are expected to fall again by up to five percent before picking up in the second half of the year.
(Image:Â Trendforce)
Further price reductions
Flash prices are expected to fall by up to 18 percent in the first quarter, depending on the location and type of component. Sales are falling more sharply than prices because memory manufacturers are reducing production and thus selling fewer chips. In this way, they want to avoid even greater price reductions.
Components for consumer SSDs are expected to fall the most in price because demand is currently low. Samsung, among others, apparently wants to shift part of its production to components for server SSDs because there is more money to be made there due to the demand for AI systems. Such models use larger packages and more frequent QLC variants (4 bits per cell, quadruple level cells) to increase capacity.
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The sales of Kioxia and Western Digital / Sandisk have only slumped slightly because the two manufacturers are selling proportionately more server SSDs. Trendforce does not provide separate figures for Chinese manufacturers such as YMTC.
In Germany, the price reductions have so far only been sporadic – depending on which supplier the components come from. Some models from Lexar (starting from 109,99 €) and Kingston (starting from 93,98 €), for example, have recently become cheaper; both companies only buy chips from other manufacturers. Samsung prices, on the other hand, are stable (starting from 119,90 €) or rising (starting from 130,90 €).
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