Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch

Samsung maintains production cuts despite rising NAND flash prices

• Samsung is carefully managing supply by instituting a 50% reduction in production to avoid any potential negative impact on NAND profitability.

• The prevailing view holds that the recent uptick in NAND flash prices is attributed more to supply constraints than to an actual surge in demand.

Kioxia offers SK hynix chip making access in Japan

• The firm is giving Hynix the opportunity to produce semiconductors at its Japanese location in a bid to revive its merger talks with Western Digital.

Kioxia and WD JV to receive up to USD 1 billion government subsidy.

The subsidy will be invested in JV’s Japanese facility that will produce its latest generation of 3D flash memory based on the innovative wafer bonding technology and future generation of advanced nodes.

SK hynix will spend big on the development of its HBM tech as competition heats up in the next-gen AI GPU space

•Hynix stated that the 2024 supply of HDM is already sold out. It posted an operating profit of USD 259 million in Q4 2023 after four consecutive quarters of loss.

Micron's 24GB HBM3E chips to power Nvidia's next-gen AI GPUs

•• HBM3E is the latest ultra-fast memory from Micron designed for datacenter and AI-class CPUs, e.g. Nvidia’s H200 that is expected to be launched in Q2’24 with six HBM3E memory chips.

• • Micron is the first firm to announce HBM3E volume production, with bandwidth improvement from the 1TB/s of HBM3 to 1.2TB/s. The firm is also planning HBM3E 36GB chips that is said to have even higher bandwidth and more power efficiency then the 24GB.

SUPPLY TREND

2023-2024 Worldwide SSD Shipment

after peak shipment in 4Q23, WW SSD demand is expected to grow stably throughout 2024.

2023-2024 Worldwide DRAM Output

DRAM production for all applications has fallen slightly from the levels seen in 4Q23, but is still expected to reach a new highpoint in 2H24 compared to the entirety of 2023.

2023-2024 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio

NAND Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level from 2H23

Price Trend: NAND Flash price is likely to climb continuously in 1H24, after a sharp rise in 4Q23

2023-2024 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio

DRAM Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level during 1Q-2Q24
Price Trend: 8Gb contract price demonstrated obvious growth in Jan.’24., and will remain higher than the spot low level in 2024

SUPPLY SIGNAL

	Type	Supply	Price
DRAM Module	DDR3	●	▲
	DDR4	●	▲
	DDR5	●	▲
Flash Storage	SLC	●	▂
	MLC	●	▲
	3D TLC (BiCS3) *Limited Supply. We encourage you to migrate to BiCS4 and BiCS5	●	▲
	3D TLC (BiCS4)	●	▲
	3D TLC (BiCS5)	●	▲