In response to the strong demand for large capacity in smartphones and big data, and the development of artificial intelligence, Samsung, Toshiba, Western Digital, Micron, Intel, SK Hynix and others are optimistic about the growth of demand for NAND Flash in the future market. However, the NAND Flash market is slightly oversupplied so that prices keep going down, due to the increasing output about 64-layer 3D NAND of the original factory and the advent of QLC.
ChinaFlashMarket released that the price of eMMC was stable in August, with eMMC 32GB TLC at $7.5 and eMMC 64GB TLC at $14. In terms of SSD, the price of high-capacity SSDs continued decline as a result of the expansion of new 64-layer 3D NAND. According to the elinfor.com, the price of SSD 120GB TLC fell from $25 to $24 in August, a drop of 4%; 240GB TLC fell from $38 to $37, down 2.6%; 480GB TLC fell from $72 to $68, down 5.6%.
Notably, Samsung plans to increase its investment in chip manufacturing facilities from $24.29 billion to $26.69 billion in order to strengthen its semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, while Micron announces that in the next 12 years it plans to invest $3 billion to expand the Manassas plant in Virginia, USA, which is expected to put into production in 2020 and will mainly produce long-life storage products. Similarly, SK hynix will also raise capital expenditure to $13.35 billion, and announces that it will invest $3.114 billion in a new storage plant in Lichuan, Gyeonggi Province which will start construction at the end of 2018 and is forecasted to be completed in October 2020. Fab 7, Toshiba's largest memory factory, is already under construction and is expected to be completed by the end of 2019 and put into production in 2020.
Most of the new storage factories of the original factory are expected to be completed by 2020. However, at present, the price of NAND Flash continues to decline, together with the continuous expansion of the original factory, raising the market panic coefficient, which has affected market price fluctuations.