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Spot price trend of the mainstream NAND Flash chips has maintained stable this week (July 19-23). Despite more industry players project a positive price trend in late Q3, most have been conservative still.
Thanks to solid demand from low-density memory card, we continue seeing some traders/brokers look for low-density MLC NAND Flash chips this week. Yet, in light of the recent rapid price surge, lesser speculative trading is seen. Accordingly, the price growth of low-density memory card is limited. ASP of a 2GB microSD card only posted a mild growth from USD3.90 to USD3.98 this week.
For the high-density segment, prices for both TLC and MLC NAND Flash have maintained weak, reflecting a slow demand at channels. Despite more industry players project a positive price trend to emerge in late Q3, most have been very cautious.
In the contract market, a mild downtrend has continued into 2HJuly. We are not surprised about the mild price downtrend in the TLC segment as TLC Flash is still limited to applications such as USB drive and memory card. A slow channel demand, without doubts, will reflect on corresponding TLC Flash price trend directly.
What draws our attention is the high-density MLC segment (64Gb and above). Since more module houses have started using Intel’s 25nm 64Gb NAND Flash, the competitive pricing that Intel offers has dragged overall price down in a noticeable manner.
16Gb MLC is the only item that posted sequential price growth in 2HJuly, thanks to solid demand from low-density memory card makers in China. We continue see GPS, eBook vendors look for memory card recently, though the strength has been weaken.
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