Will the storage industry usher in a turnaround? Global Flash Memory Market Demand Recovery in 2023

With the development of 5G networks and cloud computing, as well as the rise of smart phones, laptops, game consoles, and other facilities, the global flash memory market demand is expected to recover in 2023. On March 23, Cheng Weihua, chief operating officer of Changjiang Storage, said that it was expected that the global demand for flash memory would rebound in 2023, and the supply and demand would tend to balance.

According to a new survey by TrendForce, an international market research institute, since the second half of 2022, the NAND Flash market has been facing headwind demand, and the supply chain has been actively destocking to cope with declining market demand, resulting in a 20% to 25% decline in the flash contract price of NAND in the fourth quarter.

In the first quarter of 2023, Jibang Consulting emphasized that the load on the production lines of Armor Knight and Meguiar will continue to be low, and Western Data and SK Hynix will track the production reduction, which has the opportunity to reduce the current oversupply phenomenon. The average price decline of NAND Flash will also converge to 10-15%.

The warehousing market in 2022 experienced a "severe winter", but after a year of optimized development, warehousing manufacturers have a broad outlook for the warehousing market in 2023 in their latest financial reports. At the same time, the prices of storage devices such as NAND Flash and DRAM have gradually stabilized, bringing more business opportunities to storage device manufacturers.

Although macroeconomic uncertainty is expected to continue, Samsung expects a recovery to begin in the second half of the year, mainly in the HPC and automotive industries.

SK Hynix said that although the market downturn continued to deepen in the first half of this year, it is expected that the market situation will become better and better in the second half of this year. In addition, SK Hynix predicts that IT companies will increase the number of memory semiconductors whose prices have fallen significantly compared to the industry, and market demand will slowly rebound.

Meguiar expects the storage demand trend to gradually improve in the coming months. With the improvement of customer inventory levels and the release of new CPU platforms, as the economy reopens, China's demand begins to grow.

Armor Xia emphasized that despite the uncertain economic outlook, PC and smartphone market demand is still weak, and NAND demand has significantly decreased in the short term. However, with the comprehensive restart of the Chinese economy this year, customer inventory levels have decreased quarterly. Kaixia expects market demand to recover in the second half of this year, and in the long run, Kaixia is still confident in the growth potential of the NAND market.