This article was reprinted with permission from Superpower.com.
In the previous year, SSD was one of several accessories for price hikes, but in the second half of the year, prices have dropped somewhat. At the beginning of this year, SSD prices have stabilized, as Samsung, Toshiba, Micron and Hynix plan to expand the production capacity of NAND flash memory. The direct result is that the global output of NAND in 2019 is higher than 2018, and the prices of related products such as SSD continue to decline.
At the end of March this year, Samsung held a groundbreaking ceremony for the start of the second phase of the storage chip project in Xi’an. It will invest US$7 billion in the next three years and double the monthly production of NAND wafers to 220,000 to meet the needs of the global IT market. Demand for 3D NAND flash chips, Phase 2 project is expected to go live in 2019.
Samsung, which is currently building a new plant, will start operating Toshiba's Fab 6 next year. At the same time, after announcing the sale of Bain Capital, Toshiba said it will invest US$7 billion in the construction of Fab 7. DRAMeXchange believes that Toshiba Fab 7 will begin mass production of 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory in the second half of 2019.
Micron, their third flash memory plant in Singapore also started construction earlier this month. It plans to complete construction in the middle of 2019 and put into production in the fourth quarter. It is estimated that the same production project as Toshiba will be 64- or 96-layer 3D NAND flash memory. The situation of SK Hynix is similar to that of the first three homes. The M15 plant is almost always operating next year.
According to this situation, NAND prices will begin to loosen in the first half of next year, and oversupply will occur in the second half of the year. The prices of SSDs and other products will further decrease.
