Despite competition between SSD vendors being fiercer than ever, and set to get fiercer, we could still see price rises on NAND based products. According to DRAMeXchange prices for NAND flash parts have risen 2-4% since the start of June and that price trend will continue throughout the year. The reason it will continue is because both Micron and SK Hynix are reducing the downstream supply of NAND flash parts from their inventory, but at the same time demand is fairly high and growing. Micron will be drawing away a lot of its NAND production towards its Crucial brand for increased SSD production while Apple have already secured a sizeable amount of NAND flash production from SanDisk and SK Hynix ahead of a new iPhone launch in the second half of this year. Rising demand for enterprise use SSD devices and cloud servers is expected to further inflate NAND flash demand and prices. Whether increased NAND Flash prices lead to increased prices is another thing that is yet to be seen. It is quite possible SSD prices could keep falling as costs of other components (DRAM caches, controller logics, etc) continue to fall with technological advancements.
Source: Digitimes
Image courtesy of eTeknix
