14 DAY TRIAL // The tendency towards miniaturization is old news when speaking about electronics and cell phones, and Samsung could have a decisive influence on the market through its new NAND flash models employing a 70 nanometers technology.
The first ones to benefit from the new memories are the MP3 players' manufacturers, the competition between flash-based and hard-disk-based models being a bloody one. If Samsung would come up with new and lower prices, that would automatically lead to a decrease of the production costs for a MP3 Player unit.
Practically, the manufacturers would be able do design models with lower prices and higher storage capacities.
In fact, IDC has estimated that a lower price for the NAND memory chips, in case of which Samsung owned a market share of 60% at the end of March, could lead to a price for memory cards that is five times smaller than the current one.
Moreover, Samsung contemplates the idea that by the end of the year, one third of its NAND chips output will be represented by the ones using the 70 nanometers technology.
Other experts comment that, by increasing its productive capacity, Samsung does not necessarily target a reduction of prices, but rather tries to set up new standards.
The Samsung manufacturing capacity for NAND is almost 2.5 times bigger compared to that of the Toshiba company, which has a market share of 20%.