Korean media: SK Hynix returns to the top five NAND flash memory manufacturers

According to South Korean media BusinessKorea, SK Hynix defeated Intel in the global NAND flash memory market in the first quarter of 2020 and returned to fifth place.

According to a recent report by market research firm DRAMeXchange, SK Hynix's NAND flash memory sales in the first quarter of this year were US$1.447 billion, accounting for 10.7% of the global market. The company's market share increased by 1.1% from the previous quarter, and its sales also increased by 19.8% from the previous quarter. Intel's market share increased from 9.7% to 9.9%, but its ranking based on sales fell to sixth place, second only to SK Hynix.

Industry insiders believe that SK Hynix's increased market share is due to the surge in server SSD sales. Earlier, SK Hynix said in its first quarter earnings conference that server SSD sales accounted for 40% of NAND flash sales. The company's NAND flash shipments increased by 7% month-on-month in the first quarter, and the proportion of NAND flash sales in total sales also increased accordingly.

However, industry insiders also pointed out that SK Hynix's NAND flash memory business has been in the red for six consecutive quarters. Although SK Hynix is ​​confident that it will achieve a surplus supply of NAND flash memory in the fourth quarter of this year, some experts predict that demand may decline if the spread of the new crown pneumonia causes cloud companies to postpone server expansion plans.

As for why SK Hynix has not made a profit from NAND flash memory, industry insiders believe that the company's competitiveness in controller technology is weak, so it cannot improve the commercial value of high value-added products such as SSDs, embedded multimedia cards (eMMCs) and mobile universal flash storage (UFS) devices. In addition, experts emphasize that in order to solve the above problems, SK Hynix needs to increase investment to upgrade its technology.