Weak Consumer Electronics Demand Drives 4Q24 NAND Flash Revenue Down 6.2% QoQ, Says TrendForce

[AleksandarK]

TrendForce's latest research reveals that the NAND Flash market faced downward pressure in 4Q24 as PC and smartphone manufacturers continued inventory clearance efforts, leading to significant supply chain adjustments. Consequently, NAND Flash prices reversed downward, with ASP dropping 4% QoQ, while overall bit shipments declined by 2%. Total industry revenue fell 6.2% QoQ to US$16.52 billion.

Looking ahead to 1Q25, the traditional slow season effect remains unavoidable despite suppliers actively reducing production. Server and other key end-market inventory restocking has slowed, and with both order volumes and contract prices declining sharply. NAND Flash industry revenue is expected to drop by up to 20% QoQ. However, as production cuts take effect and prices stabilize, the NAND Flash market is expected to recover in the second half of 2025.




Samsung retained its top position but faced a 9.7% QoQ revenue decline to $5.6 billion, impacted by weak demand for consumer electronics. Moving forward, Samsung aims to focus on enterprise SSD development and adjust production plans to respond to market shifts.

SK Group (including SK hynix and Solidigm) was affected by order cuts across the market, preventing it from meeting its previously set shipment growth targets. Q4 revenue fell 6.6% QoQ to $3.39 billion, securing second place. SK plans to dynamically adjust capacity in response to fluctuations in demand, positioning itself as a comprehensive AI ecosystem memory supplier through HBM, DRAM, and enterprise SSD offerings.

Kioxia, ranked third, saw enterprise SSD shipments offset weak smartphone and PC demand, limiting its Q4 revenue decline to just 0.2% QoQ, reaching $2.66 billion. The company is increasing NAND Flash layer count and significantly improving data transfer speeds, leveraging existing equipment for technological upgrades.

Micron, despite strong enterprise SSD shipments, was unable to counterbalance weak consumer demand, with Q4 NAND Flash revenue down 9.3% QoQ to $2.28 billion, placing it fourth. In 2025, Micron will cut capital expenditures on NAND Flash, slow down technology upgrades, and focus on 60 TB + SSD demand to improve profitability.

Western Digital/SanDisk, ranked fifth, saw consumer NAND product shipments exceed expectations, leading to a QoQ increase in total bit shipments. Despite falling prices, NAND Flash revenue remained flat at $1.88 billion. As NVIDIA's Project Digits and the AI PC trend gain traction, SanDisk, a key PC SSD supplier, is expected to see steady revenue growth starting in 2Q25.

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[Chomiq]

Drives are still expensive, what do they expect?

 

[Bwaze]

Wasn't it foretold that AI server and other enterprise demand will make consumer non-enthusiasm irrelevant?

And why should consumer be enthusiastic about the offerings?

No matter how the makers and reviewers try to spin the increase in sequential speeds, real world performance in day to day task is basically unaffected for last half of decade, capacity is stagnating for more than half of decade*, and price wise we are now in second year of "correction" that rised the prices across all makers and capacities.

* - well, not entirely true, more and more lines of drives that had previously 4 TB as maximum capacity are now offering max 2 TB.

It's evolving, just backwards!

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Maybe there is too much like cartel actions by nand chip and SSD manufacturers. This is not a free market and there is no real competition. In addition, 100% of all stores are scalpers. How do we expect (fast) progress and satisfied users who do not limit their purchases? Tons of justifications for the actions of the last five years do not sound justifiable to me in any way, including the "bad" scaling in lithography recently, since nand flash chips are still quite far behind the nodes, which scale unsatisfactory in terms of the overall dimensions of the memory cells.

 

[Bwaze]

Samsung QVO 8 TB was launched in 2020 on a 96 layer 19 nm NAND. True, it was a large SATA drive, but there were enterprise NVMe drives and soon in consumer on a same process. Ancient, compared to what we have now - 200+ layer 8 nm chips, and all we have been offered for this increase are higher prices, and 2230 form factor 2 TB drives ..

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Samsung QVO 8 TB was launched in 2020

2019! In month of May 2020, Sabrent launch first in the world m.2 SSD 8TB.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Maybe there is too much like cartel actions by nand chip and SSD manufacturers. This is not a free market and there is no real competition. In addition, 100% of all stores are scalpers. How do we expect (fast) progress and satisfied users who do not limit their purchases? Tons of justifications for the actions of the last five years do not sound justifiable to me in any way, including the "bad" scaling in lithography recently, since nand flash chips are still quite far behind the nodes, which scale unsatisfactory in terms of the overall dimensions of the memory cells.

Not quite sure what you mean by bad scaling, but a lot of the NAND makers announced that they put the brakes on improved nodes due to weak demand a couple of years ago. Those nodes are going into production now, so there's that gap if nothing else.

Samsung QVO 8 TB was launched in 2020 on a 96 layer 19 nm NAND. True, it was a large SATA drive, but there were enterprise NVMe drives and soon in consumer on a same process. Ancient, compared to what we have now - 200+ layer 8 nm chips, and all we have been offered for this increase are higher prices, and 2230 form factor 2 TB drives ..

NAND has not been shrunk under 10 nm as yet.

 

[Bwaze]

NAND has not been shrunk under 10 nm as yet.

My bad, looked at controller node, not NAND.

 

[Philaphlous]

Everyone is paying out the ears for eggs...what do companies expect?

 

[bonehead123]

a lot of the NAND makers announced that they put the brakes on improved nodes due to weak demand a couple of years ago

And why did this happen ?

Because during and after the Covid, most of the NAND makers (and many other mfgrs too) started acting like scalpers on steroids on more steroids, taking advantage of the situation, with absolutely ZERO concern for consumers, who were losing their jobs, getting laid off, or forced into working from home, and then when demand starting easing, they failed to adjust their production, which in turn caused massive oversupplies, which in turn required significant price drops to clear the excess inventory, and so on & so on...

Aint capitalism a fickle but double-edged, sword-swinging biotch ?

It's their own fault, so as far as I am concerned, they can B.M.A, since I stocked up at the end of '24, by buying over $7K worth of m.2's (when the prices bottomed out), so I'm set for the foreseeable future storage-wise

 

[Wirko]

NAND has not been shrunk under 10 nm as yet.

And those nm are imaginary nanometres anyway.

A couple points of reference:

Samsung V-NAND V2, 40 nm, 32-layer, one of the first 3D dies, 2014 = 128 Gbit on 69 mm²
Kioxia BiCS8, unknown nm, 218-layer, one of the latest 3D dies, 2024 = 1 Tbit on 60 mm²

Ten years, about 9x increase in density because layers, but only about 1.3x increase in density per layer. Realistically, the process is still 40 nm.

Another point of reference: Planar Micron 34 nm dies from 2008 had about 3x the density per layer compared to the above two examples.

 

[chrcoluk]

Who would have known that when they pumped prices back up sales would fall, We need Jan 2024 prices again please.

 

[Bwaze]

And those nm are imaginary nanometres anyway.

A couple points of reference:

Samsung V-NAND V2, 40 nm, 32-layer, one of the first 3D dies, 2014 = 128 Gbit on 69 mm²
Kioxia BiCS8, unknown nm, 218-layer, one of the latest 3D dies, 2024 = 1 Tbit on 60 mm²

Ten years, about 9x increase in density because layers, but only about 1.3x increase in density per layer. Realistically, the process is still 40 nm.

Another point of reference: Planar Micron 34 nm dies from 2008 had about 3x the density per layer compared to the above two examples.

Yeah, every major jump in layer count was accompanied with press releases from companies promising price drops and arrival of larger drives not only in enterprise, but also consumer space. We even had announcements in various shows like CES. And nothing materialized except for largely irrelevant higher sequential speeds.

 

[Wirko]

Has anyone analysed Trendforce's past predictions? Are they any good at guessing?

 

[TheLostSwede]

And those nm are imaginary nanometres anyway.

A couple points of reference:

Samsung V-NAND V2, 40 nm, 32-layer, one of the first 3D dies, 2014 = 128 Gbit on 69 mm²
Kioxia BiCS8, unknown nm, 218-layer, one of the latest 3D dies, 2024 = 1 Tbit on 60 mm²

Ten years, about 9x increase in density because layers, but only about 1.3x increase in density per layer. Realistically, the process is still 40 nm.

Another point of reference: Planar Micron 34 nm dies from 2008 had about 3x the density per layer compared to the above two examples.

Well, we are at least somewhere between 19 and 10 nm, but yeah, the changes per node has indeed been minimal in terms of die shrinks.
This is a few years old, but I can't find any more recent comparison, but this roughly shows the nodes the big players are on and it's unlikely anyone is below 14 nm and that's on 2D NAND, the 3D stuff seems to be closer to 20 nm.
Sorry for the bad quality image, but the one below should help work out the node sizes, even though it's in traditional Chinese.

Has anyone analysed Trendforce's past predictions? Are they any good at guessing?

Not any better than anyone else out there. I would say that anything past three months isn't very accurate, largely due to the market changing so much these days.
They obviously talk to companies in Asia, but I'm not sure how good insight they have into the rest of the world.

 

[Random_User]

Drives are still expensive, what do they expect?

And they are going to be even more expensive. This is how the big cartel-trio, "compensates" the poor sales. Many SSD here became twice as expensive, since the late 2023 till late 2024. And the prices keep growing.

Spoiler

Sadly, there's no one can take in hand the loose oligopoly DRAM/NAND manufacturers gang. The respective bodies, which supposed to defend consumer rights, have no power of will.
And not buying, isn't an answer either, because they will just raise the prices even more. They will invent some disaster, to make it more belieavable. This is horrible situation, with no solution.