Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch

Samsung announced UFS 4.0 offering 2x performance compared to UFS 3.1. It is said to be adopted in future automotive applications, Augmented reality (AR), and Virtual reality (VR). Mass production of the new memory is likely to commence in the third quarter of 2022.
Samsung plans to continue to expand the proportion of 3D NAND flash this year to 78% reported by TrendForce.

Samsung announced that the industry is looking to discontinue the production of DDR3 due to dwindling market demands, and higher demands for its DDR4 and DDR5 options instead.

KIOXIA and WDC have finalized a formal agreement to jointly invest in the first phase of the Fab7 (Y7) manufacturing facility in Yokkaichi Plant, Japan.
This joint-venture investment adds a sixth flash memory manufacturing facility to the Yokkaichi Plant, enhancing its position as the world's largest flash memory manufacturing site. The first phase of the Y7 facility will produce 3D flash memory including 112- and 162-layer and future nodes.

Activist investor Elliott Investment Management urged WDC on May 3rd to separate its Flash business and offered to invest US$1 billion to facilitate a sale or a spin-off of the business. WDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SK Hynix announced that the industry is looking to discontinue the production of DDR3 due to dwindling market demands, and higher demands for its DDR4 and DDR5 options instead.

In the second fiscal quarter of 2022 Micron derived 73% of its revenue from DRAM chips and 25% from NAND chips. Those two segments also saw year-over-year revenue increases of 29% and 19%, respectively. Micron is taking several steps to capitalize on this growth, starting with a stronger focus in the data center market. In March, Micron announced the world's first vertically integrated 176-layer NAND SSD for the data center with latencies of under 2ms.

SUPPLY TREND

NAND Flash 512Gb TLC Contract Price and Sufficiency, 2021 - 2022

NAND Sufficiency: Shortage in Q222 due to WDC and KIOXIA’s material contamination. Expected to recover in July.
Price Trend: SSD prices are expected to remain at the same level.

DDR4 8Gb 1G*8 3200MHz ASP and Sufficiency, 2021 - 2022

DRAM Sufficiency: Expected to be sufficient until Q422.
Price Trend: Contract prices are expected to remain stable.

SUPPLY SIGNAL

	Type	Supply	Price
DRAM Module	DDR3	●	▲
	DDR4	●	▂
	DDR5	●	▂
Flash Storage	SLC	●	▂
	MLC	●	▂
	3D TLC(BiCS3)	●	▲
	3D TLC(BiCS4)	●	▂
	3D TLC(BiCS5)	●	▂

● Smooth supply ● Tight supply ▂ Flat ▲ Upward trend

WORK WITH ADATA

The message remains the same as April's:
The DDR3 allocation of the existing customers has been secured. For new customers, please reach out to us and see how we can facilitate your needs in our planning.
For customers who are using 3D TLC BiCS3, we encourage you to move to the latest technology such as BiCS4 or BiCS5. In case it is not possible in your application, we will be pleased to work on your annual demand and plan everything ahead.