14 DAY TRIAL // After quite a while of continuously decreasing prices, it appears that NAND Flash chips have finally managed to go up instead of down, even if it is just temporary.
With all the odd things happening on the IT market, prices of various products have been on the decline, particularly those of DRAM and NAND chips.
The main reason behind this is the fact that the supply of such products has been on a steady rise while demand failed to keep up.
This happened after many makers of semiconductors moved on to newer and more advanced manufacturing process technologies.
Granted, this did lead to higher data densities and lower power consumption, but the fact remains that demand still did not match existing inventories.
Now, however, it seems that a small price rebound has finally occurred on the NAND chip segment, at least as far as this week is concerned.
Over the past few days, demand was mostly focused on the low-density MLC (multi-level cell) segment, since demand is expected to pick up when it comes to bundled memory cards, at least so says inSpectrum.
For those interested in numbers, 16 Gb MLC NAND Flash chips grew to $3.78, by 3% as it were, while the 32 Gb chips based on the same architecture saw no change. Memory cards went from $3.30 to $3.60 because of this.
“Some traders/brokers have resumed their buying incentive only because they find the current price level of MLC Flash chips safe for them to replenish inventory.”
On the other hand, TLC chips fell by 3% as well, to $3.46.
“Given that price of the same-density MLC is priced lower than TLC and the mass still concern about quality of the later, more traders/brokers clear their TLC Flash inventory and thus drag corresponding price down further,” said inSpectrum.