[Click e-Stock] "NAND Demand Increase... Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix Respond"

On the 5th, Korea Investment & Securities recommended monitoring the future increase in NAND demand and responding mainly through Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

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Cha Min-sook, a researcher at Korea Investment & Securities, stated, "Recently, demand for enterprise solid-state drives (SSD) for corporate use has suddenly increased," adding, "In particular, the demand for high-capacity products is likely for artificial intelligence (AI) servers." She continued, "Although overall NAND demand has not improved, enterprise SSDs are high value-added products with higher average selling prices (ASP) than mobile universal flash storage (UFS) or PC SSDs," explaining, "This leads to an increase in NAND's ASP, which will affect the improvement in operating profit margins of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix."

The controllers and firmware that make up enterprise SSDs are 100% customized for each customer. Researcher Cha analyzed, "If there are no controllers and firmware available for sale for enterprise SSD customers' projects, the market that can be addressed decreases accordingly." She also added, "Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix can respond to most enterprise SSD projects with in-house developed controllers and firmware."

Researcher Cha explained that the market share of these two companies is higher within the enterprise SSD market than in the overall NAND market. However, he noted, "It is still too early to link the increase in enterprise SSD demand to increased NAND investment," advising, "It will be necessary to observe how much demand increases in the future."

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