SanDisk: Yargh, nobody does SD-cards bundled with phones anymore
Damn you, with your capacious embedded blower storage
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We thought the flash storage market was booming, but even so SanDisk came within a whisker of making a loss in its second quarter as revenues of $1.03 billion tumbled 25 per cent annually and 14 per cent compared to the first quarter.
The profit was just $13 million, compared to $114.3 million the previous quarter. Revenues fell $176 million from the first quarter and profits fell $101.3 million, as SanDisk was caught out by events and couldn't or wouldn't react fast enough. What went wrong?
Recent SanDisk quarterly revenue and profit history
Nothing much according to Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO:
"We delivered second quarter results in line with our forecast, reflecting short-term weakness in our mobile OEM sales, strength in retail, especially in international markets, and growth in our enterprise and client SSD products … SSD revenues achieved 10 per cent of second quarter sales with growing adoption of our solutions by major OEMs. We also made good progress on our embedded product roadmap for mobile customers. We believe that strengthening industry fundamentals and our expanding portfolio of solutions will contribute to improving financial results in the second half of 2012."
Yeah, yeah, but this lousy second quarter comes after a first quarter that was lousy too, with revenues falling to $1.2 billion from the preceding quarter's $1.58 billion and profits dropping to $114.4 million from $281 million. Revenues have dropped $556 million in two quarters and profits $268 million.
Come on guys. This is starting to look bad.
In the earnings call, Mehrotra said:
"In the second quarter, as we discussed previously, the bundled card opportunity with handset OEMs continued to decline due to a combination of OEMs reducing their … costs and increasing their mix of embedded flash smartphones."
SanDisk is building up its embedded business to take account of this:
"Overall, we are driving aggressively towards reinvigorating the growth of our embedded business and are encouraged with the success achieved so far."
In the SDD area it has customer qualifications, and PCIe flash-wise OEM shipments have begun. It's got some Ultrabook flash design wins but Ultrabooks sales are not booming. In essence it's late to the mobile phone embedded flash party, and its PCIe and Ultrabook flash product sales are not ramping fast enough to compensate.
Looking ahead Mehrotra said:
"We now forecast lower industry supply growth for both 2012 and 2013. This is the result of the industry slowdown in capacity growth, a continued slowdown in technology transition and a longer deal of technology nodes driven by OEM requirement … [and] we look forward to improved performance in the second half of 2012 and beyond."
The third quarter revenue forecast is a rise to $1.2 billion +/- $50 million. They'll be praying it happens. ®
COMMENTS
"nobody does SD-cards bundled with phones anymore"
Surely you mean "nobody does *low-capacity SD-cards we can't normally shift ourselves* bundled with phones anymore"? I doubt they were selling them for much anyway.
Sd card industry needs to wake up
There is a company named "Team" sounding very lame (IMHO) who puts ECC in memory cards (at least, advertises feature) and their class 10 price is cheaper than Sandisk class 4.
Sandisk allows their distributors go insane with 32Gb+ high speed models. They don't do basic things being a large company like lobbying google& all non Microsoft for ext4 (or anything non fat) for operating systems. Result? You can't plug anything higher than 32gb to a lot of devices.
If I were them, I would even lobby for a flat filesystem on Android. This "internal memory", "sd card" thing really confuses average people. Manufacturers hate it too. "out of internal memory" is still a major issue. Plug a sd card and capacity magically increased. Linux/ Unix can do it, stop this needless C: D: joke, even Microsoft hates it.
Re: Sd card industry needs to wake up
On the internal external memory thing, why not just colour (color) code them?
Normal file system tones for local drive and something stand out (E.G. purple) for those stored on the specific removable memory type.
If the memory can't be removed by all means hide the disk management but where files will "disappear" of you pull the card mark them as such. Have the SD card slot that is the same colour may hint where they reside.
I'd like an option for each file or folder to right click "Take With" - "Purple" so that I can at a stroke move the file to that removable drive.
If you format USB thumb drives with reference (like "Presentations") have the file system remember that and if you want to "Take With" - "Presentations" it will prompt you to connect the drive.
Have an encrypted drives tagged and trust dated if you try to save "Company Accounts" or "Database of personal data" to disk "Presentations" it refuses, but may offer Connect "Secure201209" or "Create new encrypted drive".
Half the reason unencrypted data gets lost in the post is CD/DVD go in envelopes and the PC has not been set up to tell you that's a bad idea.
Get these storage companies to dream up "more finger friendly" encrypted data post-card format (rectangular) with visible ident codes so "company A" uses one to store the sensitive data for "company B" peels off the spare ident tag and keeps that.
On receipt company B phones A with a challenge request (additional step required to un-encrypt) "company A" uses local software with the Ident Tag to pass a few numbers to company B and the memory can be read.
result lost cards can go home if found, unencryption harder without the (one time pad type) challenge and both companies have a record of transfer.
Micro memory sales being held back by narrow thinking to me.
Sorry for the long train of thought post.
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