NAND Flash contract price partly stayed flat or slightly declined in 2H Nov.

TAIPEI, TAIWAN: NAND Flash contract price partly stayed flat or slightly declined 2-4 percent in 2H November. Some memory card & UFD makers plan to lower their inventory level by the end of 2009 as the NAND Flash restock demand for year-end sales has peaked in November.

Moreover, recently some dealers under-weighed the pre-hoard position of low-capacity memory cards in spot market, and the additional supply was available to some memory card makers from the new white-box memory card vendor.

Therefore, some NAND Flash suppliers slightly cut some low-density MLC NAND Flash contract price in 2H November. However, high-density NAND Flash contract price roughly remained stable in 2H November, according to DRAMeXchange.

Mainstream NAND Flash average contract price for 16Gb MLC skyrocketed from $1.65 in last December to $5.28 in November while and 32Gb MLC surged from $3.62 in last December to $8.12 in October. Some dealers thus took profit-taking actions in spot market in November due to the risk concerns on the continuous NAND Flash price hike over the past one year, says DRAMeXchange.

Fig. 1 32Gb MLC NAND Flash contract price trendSource: DRAMeXchange

Nevertheless; some NAND Flash related downstream clients plan to lower the inventory level due to the concerns on the coming year-end financial statements required and 1H slow-season effect. Moreover, downstream makers would like to stimulate the year-end holiday sales by price-cut promotion, so recently they urged upstream suppliers to offer the better price discount especially in facing the hiking NAND Flash cost.

Besides, the increasing output portion of 3xnm process technologies will further boost the NAND Flash supply in December. DRAMeXchange expects these supply and demand factors will help the NAND Flash market turn from the tighter supply into the more eased status after the year-end restock peak period. The NAND Flash price trend thus will moderately soften in the near term due to the weakening hot-season effect and more conservative procurement sentiment.