1HDec. mainstream MLC NAND Flash avg. contract price roughly dropped 1~20 percent

TAIWAN: 1HDec. NAND Flash contract prices partially remained flat or declined that mainstream MLC NAND Flash “Average” price dropped 1-20 percent, while SLC NAND Flash price remains flat.

DRAMeXchange has seen some NAND Flash related suppliers and clients intend to lower inventory level while some are ready for pricing promotion during the year end hot season. That is, 1HDec. MLC NAND Flash contract price demonstrates the downward pattern due to the faded hot season.

Given the sharply falling memory card price over the past one month, low-density MLC products has the aggressive downward pricing drop than high-density products, says DRAMeXchange.

Given the inventory adjustment move from some memory card makers & dealers, pricing promotion by NAND Flash related vendors and supply enhancement by white-box memory cards, recently low-capacity memory card spot price significantly plunged and it resulted in the price drop for low-density NAND Flash chips.

Fig. 1: 16Gb MLC NAND Flash contract price trend.Meanwhile, in December some system product customers and memory card vendors apparently lower the inventory level due to the year-end accounting settlement purpose while 3Xnm products portion has been accelerated by NAND Flash suppliers, according to DRAMeXchange.

Therefore, the supply and demand situation has been revised from the tighter supply in November to looser status in December. Some downstream customers look forward for the pricing discount from NAND Flash suppliers for the sake of end product promotion for year-end hot-season sales. NAND Flash suppliers follow system product customers’ strategy to lower the 1HDec. contract price to stimulate the year-end holidays sales.

Given the series of inventory adjustment and pricing promotion by the year end, it’s natural to occur some reasonable correction ahead of the coming 1H slow season, especially for that NAND Flash price wildly surged over the past one year.

However, the following NAND Flash price trend will still be determined by the NAND Flash end-product sales condition. As NAND Flash downstream clients will check the sales result for year-end hot-season and the procurement requirement for the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays in January, we expect the recovering re-stock demand to be able to help stabilize the NAND Flash price trend as well.

Fig. 2 32Gb MLC NAND Flash contract price trend.