According to a report from DigiTimes, industry sources predict a drop in NAND flash prices by roughly 10% around Q2 2019 and is expected to stop near the end of the year. So if you are a consumer, then buy that damn SSD now, however, if you are a vendor, then you can finally relax as prices are expected to stabilize by the end of this year.
We’ve already seen quite a significant drop in SSD prices compared to last year which was a result of Samsung slashing NAND prices in an attempt to clear out their inventory.
The excess inventory build-up has been suggested to be because of lower demand and Samsung plans to carry on with the low-price strategy, with other companies following its footsteps.
NAND manufacturers are hellbent on disrupting this trend by cutting down the production of flash memory. Similar to video-card giants NVIDIA and AMD, NAND flash chipmakers have been having a hard time since the second half of 2018. Their inventories have been increasingly growing with a reduction in demand for SSDs. This can be attributed to lesser than the expected need for NAND memory from datacenters.
However, this has had a positive impact on consumers with SSD adoption growing to unprecedented levels in both PCs as well as smartphone devices. The overall demand for the memory is speculated to return to normal by the end of 2019, thereby ending the chip-makers nightmare.
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