Fair Trade Commission Approves SK Hynix's Acquisition of Intel's NAND Flash and SSD Divisions... Low Concern for Competition Restriction

[Sejong=Asia Economy Reporter Joo Sang-don] The Korea Fair Trade Commission approved SK Hynix's acquisition of Intel's NAND flash and SSD (solid-state drive) business units on the 27th.

NAND flash is a non-volatile memory semiconductor that retains information even when power is off, and SSD is a large-capacity storage device using NAND flash. With this acquisition, SK Hynix can strengthen its NAND flash alongside DRAM, enhancing its competitiveness in the memory semiconductor market. Intel will be divesting a non-core business that accounts for less than 10% of its total sales.

A Fair Trade Commission official explained, "The combined market share of the two companies in the NAND flash and SSD markets ranges from 13% to 27%, which is lower than the leading company (Samsung Electronics) holding over 30% market share," adding, "We judged that concerns about competition restrictions are minimal."

Additionally, although SK Hynix is the second largest in the DRAM market (with a 29% market share), other SSD manufacturers either supply DRAM themselves or procure it independently, so the Fair Trade Commission assessed that the possibility of the merged entity blocking SSD manufacturers' purchasing channels is low. The proportion of DRAM used in SSDs out of the global DRAM shipments is also low at 0.2%, indicating that the merged company has little incentive to block sales channels of other DRAM suppliers.

On the same day, the Fair Trade Commission also approved the merger of AMD, the second largest in the central processing unit (CPU) market, and Xilinx. Xilinx is the number one company in the semiconductor (FPGA) field that changes designs according to usage, and it was judged that the two companies were unlikely to be in a potential competitive relationship.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.