The NAND flash market has been through plenty of ups and downs over the last few years. Unfortunately for consumers, we are looking at another period of price increases, with analysts predicting flash memory prices to rise by as much as 40 percent. 

DRAMeXchange, a division of Trendforce, started off the year with a report stating that supply has been unable to catch up to demand and while the first quarter of a year is typically weak for pricing, demand is expected to outpace supply. With that in mind, both NAND Flash and wafer contract prices are “expected to keep increasing”.

Several factors are at play here, including power outages at the Kioxia and WDC Yokkaichi fab, a supply shortage of enterprise SSDs, NAND demand increasing from the smartphone market in addition to the fact that new game consoles are coming in 2020, with Sony and Microsoft both building units around SSDs over HDDs.

Meanwhile, a separate report from DigiTimes indicates that the NAND flash market will see contract prices for OEMs increase by up to 40 percent over the course of 2020. We don't know how much these price changes will ultimately impact consumers, but we could see a stop to the consistent decline in SSD pricing.

KitGuru Says: We are still in the early days of the year, so we're still in ‘wait and see' mode. A 40 percent price increase in manufacturing contracts doesn't necessarily equate to a 40 percent price increase for the end user looking to buy a new SSD.

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