According to the DRAMeXchange survey, the enterprise-level SSD market has benefited from growth themes such as data center, AI, big data, 5G, and edge computing in 2016. Shipments from 2016 At a scale of less than 20 million units, it has grown to a potential challenge of 30 million units this year. Looking at the shipments of enterprise-class SSDs, the annual growth rate will exceed 50% between 2016 and 2018, in all NAND Flash Among the applied products, the growth momentum is the strongest and will maintain the pace of rapid growth over the past one or two years in the next three years.
Looking into the second quarter market conditions, the demand for enterprise-level SSDs from servers/data centers is expected to rebound significantly from the first quarter's low season. However, DRAMeXchange research associate Chen Jun pointed out that since NAND Flash's overall market conditions are still in oversupply, most NAND Flash The original plant will face the pressure of capacity reduction. Therefore, it is expected that the average price of enterprise-class PCIe SSD and SATA SSD will both decline by 10% or more in the second quarter.
In addition to capacity pressure, some of the enterprise-level SSD suppliers have adopted more aggressive pricing strategies in order to obtain more orders from downstream OEM customers to benefit from the entry into the enterprise-grade SSD, a market with high growth momentum in the future. Market share of major suppliers. Adopting the latest cost-competitive 64/72-layer 3D-NAND is the main reason why these manufacturers can successfully implement price war strategies.
Looking forward to the third quarter, driven by the demand for enterprise-class SSDs, Client SSDs and smart phones, NAND Flash market conditions have the opportunity to shift from oversupply to small demand. However, the competition among suppliers in the enterprise SSD market will become increasingly fierce. The possibility that the prices of enterprise-level SSDs in the third quarter will continue to decline is still high.
Chen Hao stated that the latest 64/72-layer 3D-SSDs from Intel, Samsung, Micron, Toshiba, SK Hynix, etc. have been sampled and tested by major customers, and they have also entered the mass production stage. This is also the market competition this year. The main cause of the increase. In addition, the penetration of Intel's next-generation Purely platform will quickly rise and become the mainstream of the market this year, and most vendors will re-invest their R&D resources this year on PCIe interface related products. Although some suppliers have launched 3D this year, - Planning of QLC SSD products, but considering R&D progress and customer verification time, DRAMeXchange expects to see significant shipments as early as the first half of 2019.