14 DAY TRIAL // Just some months ago, Japanese electronics and semiconductor giant Toshiba was announcing that it was reducing its NAND production by up to 30% to try and rebalance the supply and demand ratio on the market.
The goal of the company was to increase NAND prices as that level of pricing was not profitable.
What most of the media doesn’t really know is the fact that there were some other reasons involved back then.
As most of you know, Japan is still recovering after the devastating tsunami wave and for many months, several nuclear energy plants were not functioning, thus local businesses were required to buy energy from different sources, other than nuclear.
That energy was much more expensive than nuclear energy and many companies had considerably increased production costs over the past year.
Toshiba realized that NAND produced in this situation had very high production costs and thus the company decided to lower the volume.
The other NAND makers reportedly never followed Toshiba’s lead.
Micron actually increased its production to fill in the gap and SSD makers even designed different versions of their products that used Micron NAND flash chips instead of Toshiba NAND.
A clear example of such a product is OCZ’s Vertex 4 512M that uses Micron NAND instead of Toshiba flash. The “M” in the product name is exactly related to the fact that there is Micron-made NAND inside of the drive.
OCZ even complained recently about not reaching their sales goal due to the NAND production crisis apparently induced by Toshiba’s production cut.
Now Toshiba is announcing a positive production ramp of up to 30% and a price cut ranging between 20% and 25%.
This clearly means that there will be an SSD price cutting contest happening very soon.