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Flash, Sam, wallop: Samsung crashes ahead as top NAND chip flinger

According to these here estimates, anyway

Samsung increased its market share in the NAND supply world in the third quarter of the year, analysts reckon. According to TrendForce's latest estimates, the suppliers' overall flash shipments for Q3 2017 looked like this:

Company 3Q17 Revenue QoQ change 3Q17 share 2Q17 share
Samsung $5,619.9 19.5% 37.2% 35.6%
Toshiba $2,740.0 18.1% 18.1% 17.5%
WDC $2,523.4 8.9% 16.7% 17.5%
Micron $1,838.0 7.7% 12.2% 12.9%
SK Hynix $1,503.8 15.4% 9.9% 9.9%
Intel $891.0 1.9% 5.9% 6.6%
Total $15,116.0 14.3% - -

The revenue figures are in millions of dollars. These numbers, published this month, include flash memory going into smartphone and other mobile devices, as well as consumer and enterprise solid-state storage.

Samsung dominates with a 37.2 per cent share of the market, we're told, which is roughly twice that of each of the second and third-ranked suppliers: Toshiba and WDC. TrendForce said all the suppliers are shifting their factory lines toward 64-layer 3D NAND – SK Hynix is pushing 72-layer flash, apparently – and as this manufacturing process matures, yields will rise. The beancounters expect the flash market will over supply next year because of this, which should mean prices on SSDs and flash memory chips will relax somewhat.

Plotting third quarter market shares on a pie chart gives us this picture:

Pie chart of market share

Intel looks the weakest of the gang, but things change if we look at the enterprise market, where it is the number two player behind Samsung, we're told. Wells Fargo tech analyst Aaron Rakers has seen TrendForce's enterprise SSD numbers and, according to these, Samsung had a 43 per cent capacity shipment share in biz-grade drives during the third quarter, followed by Intel at a stable 22 per cent. ®

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