Driven by the growing sales and high memory usage of Apple’s iPhone, the NAND flash memory market is set to face global shortage of supply while witnessing rising revenue in 2010, according to a report from market research company iSuppli Crop.NAND-type flash memory chips are widely used in cell phones, portable music players, digital cameras and camcorders, e-book readers, tablet computers and other portable gadgets for data storage. Since NAND flash is non-volatile, no power is needed to maintain the information stored in the chip, which explain its popularity among electronic devices.
iSuppli expects the sales of cell phones embedded with NAND flash chips to rise sharply this year. The shipments will be up from 643 million units in 2009 to 732 million units, showing a 13.8 percent increase compared to the 1.6 percent growth last year. Revenue will also rise by 34 percent from 13.5 billion to 18.1 billion in 2010, surpassing the growth of 14.8 percent in 2009.
The huge demand for NAND-type flash memory is partly due to the success of the iPhone, Apple’s flagship device. The research firm forecasts that total iPhone shipments will rise from 25.1 million units to 33 million units in 2010, with an average of 35.2GB NAND used in each device. With its huge requirement for flash memory chips, there may be periods of undersupply and even shortage for the year.
Meanwhile, the popularity of iPhone has also spurred the launch of a series of competitive smartphones, including Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Google Nexus One, noted Michael Yang, a senior analyst at iSuppli. As manufacturers of these handsets aim to match and even overtake the iPhone in terms of memory capacity, it bodes well for demand for NAND flash as well as other storage memory solutions like microSD cards.
NAND manufacturers and suppliers will have to invest more in capacity expansion in order to meet the ever-increasing demand in the coming years.
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