With major memory manufacturers significantly reducing production, the phenomenon of excess supply of storage chips will be further improved. Recently, according to the predictions of the three major overseas storage giants, the market situation is undergoing subtle changes.
According to Meiguang, storage chip inventory has reached a high point and is expected to usher in an industry turning point in the future. Although storage prices are still declining, the inventory pressure of manufacturers has reached its peak and is expected to gradually decrease to a safe level in the future.http://www.ic-bom.com/
SK Hynix recently revealed at the shareholders‘ meeting that it is expected that the demand for storage chips will recover in the second half of this year, but uncertainty still exists. The company will halve its capital expenditure this year and will not further reduce production.
Armor Xia also believes that with the comprehensive restart of the Chinese economy this year, customer inventory levels will decrease quarter by quarter, and market demand will recover in the second half of this year.http://www.ic-bom.com/
In addition, at the recently held CFMS 2023 summit, Cheng Weihua, the Chief Operating Officer of China‘s leading storage company Changjiang Storage, also mentioned in his speech that due to demand orders from smartphone, server, and personal computer manufacturers, the supply and demand of the global NAND flash memory market will reach a balance in the second half of this year.
It is worth noting that Samsung Electronics recently notified distributors that they will no longer sell DRAM chips at prices lower than the current price. DRAM spot prices have recently stopped falling, significantly earlier than expected. According to data from Global Semiconductor Watch DRAMeXchange, the spot price of one of the most common DRAM products, the DDR4 16Gb 2600, increased by 0.78% on April 11, marking the first price increase since March 7, 2022.
As the downstream of storage chips continues to digest inventory, the reduction in production by major manufacturers is almost impossible. In addition, Samsung has also reported intention to regulate production capacity, which may lead to a rebound in storage prices at any time. As a result, there is a buying trend of replenishing large quantities at low prices, and related manufacturers have welcomed a wave of urgent orders.
Licheng stated that customers are starting to increase their order strength, and this year‘s situation will be better than expected. Qunlian also revealed that customers replenished their inventory in advance, resulting in a significant increase in order volume of about 20%. Licheng is a global leader in storage packaging testing, while Qunlian is a major manufacturer of NAND Flash controller chips. Recently, the two major manufacturers have received orders and reported positive results, taking the lead in feeling the market‘s strength, revealing that the overall storage market is rapidly recovering.
Li Cheng once stated at the law conference in mid March that the operation in the first quarter of this year was even weaker than the previous off-season, and it was only expected to slowly recover from the second quarter. However, after only half a month, the situation seemed to have undergone a significant change. Li Cheng CEO Xie Yongda bluntly stated that as industry inventory gradually bottoms out and customers rush in recently, the company‘s outlook and outlook for this year will be better than originally estimated. Xie Yongda said that compared to the logic chip market, the storage market entered a correction later and also rebounded later. Moreover, most of the storage industry has wafer factories, and the reduction in production should not be too severe. As customer inventory has been depleted for almost a period, the industry naturally begins to recover its purchasing power.http://www.ic-bom.com/
Pan Jiancheng, CEO of Qunlian, pointed out that the current NAND Flash quotation is quite cheap and has successfully stimulated terminal demand. It has been observed that market demand is showing multiple growth, and it is estimated that other storage factories will announce production cuts again, which represents an opportunity for the industry to rebound in the future. Qunlian has felt the urgent demand from the customer group to replenish inventory in advance, and the recent order volume has significantly rebounded by about 20%.
So it seems that it won‘t be long before the storage industry will have a cold breeze and a warm breeze.http://www.ic-bom.com/
In the mobile phone market, the storage capacity of mid to low-end phones is developing towards 128/256GB, while the storage capacity of high-end phones is moving towards 512GB, even 1TB, and the memory of mobile phones is also moving towards 10+GB. Especially in mid to high-end Android phones, more and more 12GB/16GB LPDDR are being installed.
In the PC market, this year we will fully enter the 512G and 1T era, with a primary capacity of 1TB. Whether it‘s the iterative upgrade of next-generation high-capacity mobile products and consumer grade SSDs, or the endless emergence of innovative application scenarios, the future consumer electronics market will still be one of the important growth markets for the storage industry.
In addition, in the field of data centers, the innovation of IT architecture and the application of eSSD rich scenarios are also driving the rapid upward development of server storage capacity.http://www.ic-bom.com/
Therefore, overall, the storage market size has declined in 2022, but the storage capacity scale is still slightly increasing. Among them, the global NAND Flash capacity increased by 6% to 610 billion GB, and the global DRAM capacity increased by 2% to 190 billion GB. With the continuous development of online business and the continuous growth of massive data, the future storage market will also usher in a new round of demand changes.
