Overall market demand is weak, and NAND flash memory prices will fall by 10 to 15% in the first quarter of next year

As the fourth quarter of 2021 comes to an end, the stocking season of major smartphone manufacturers is over, ODM manufacturers will also usher in the New Year holiday, and the first quarter is basically the off-season of the calendar year, the NAND market will continue to maintain a state of oversupply, prices will continue to fall, it is expected that the price of NAND flash memory in the first quarter of next year will fall by 10 to 15%, which should be the largest decline in the whole year.

It is expected that the price of consumer SSDs will fall by 5 to 10% in the first quarter of next year, due to the reduction in demand for consumer and educational laptops, the conservative purchase of SSDs by customers, and the shift of the supply focus of the original factory to products above 128 floors, they will launch a new generation of SSDs to compete for the market, it is expected that the average capacity of consumer SSDs will increase to 567GB in 2022, plus more manufacturers will launch QLC SSDs to intensify price competition. These factors have led to a decline in the price of consumer-grade SSDs.

In terms of enterprise-level SSDs, due to the long-term shortage of large-scale data centers in North America due to long-term component shortages, the problem of shortages in the first quarter of next year does not know whether it can be solved, so server shipments will decline in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of next year. However, the enterprise SSD of the PCI-E interface is due to the normalization of component supply capacity back to the normal level, this reduction and increase will lead to a decrease in the price of next year's Q1 enterprise PCI-E SSD will drop by 3 to 8%, and the SATA SSD due to the relatively old products, the capacity is also low, manufacturers prefer to give priority to the supply of large-capacity PCI-E SSD, so the price of enterprise SATA SSD will be roughly flat.

In the consumer market, because of the decline in consumer electronics production, the demand for eMMC and UFS is relatively weak, and the price of eMMC will fall by 5 to 10% in the first quarter of next year, while the price of UFS will fall by 8 to 13%.