Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) held its lead in the global NAND flash market in the second quarter of this year, while China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) climbed to No. 3 worldwide for the first time.
Samsung accounted for 25% of global NAND shipments in the second quarter to stay at No. 1, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research on the 12th. Its NAND shipment share fell 7 percentage points from 32% two years earlier, as the company concentrated its capacity on higher-margin DRAM production.
SK hynix (000660.KS) ranked second with a 22% share, including its subsidiary Solidigm. A 40% jump in Solidigm’s shipments from the previous quarter drove the overall share gain.
YMTC secured a 14% share by shipment volume, overtaking Japan’s Kioxia to break into the global top three for the first time.
YMTC’s NAND shipments rose 22% from the same period a year earlier and 5% from the previous quarter. Analysts said the company expanded its market position by capitalizing on tight global NAND supply.
The rise in shipments did not translate directly into a higher revenue ranking, however. While YMTC ranked third by volume, it stood at No. 5 by revenue, behind U.S.-based Micron and Kioxia, because it holds a relatively low share of high-priced enterprise SSDs (eSSDs) for data centers.
Source: Counterpoint Research
Source: Counterpoint Research. Yonhap News
In the NAND market in the second quarter, demand for server eSSDs surged as artificial intelligence (AI) demand shifted rapidly from training to inference.
Server eSSDs made up 48% of total NAND shipments, up 22 percentage points from 26% a year earlier. Related industry revenue also climbed to a record high, rising fivefold from the second quarter of last year.
Counterpoint Research projected that server eSSDs would exceed half of total NAND shipments by the end of this year. It said NAND makers’ profitability would likely be set apart less by simple shipment growth than by how many high-value products such as eSSDs they can secure.