NOR struggles to maintain lead over NAND
Currently enduring a period of declining revenues, the NOR Flash market will have trouble exceeding NAND’s sales for the first time this year, which has been accelerated by NOR’s oversupply coinciding with an unanticipated NAND shortage, according to the latest data from Semico Research Corp.
Although the NOR market is bound to recover its strength after price declines subside, the 2005 oversupply will cause revenues to drop by 15 percent, the US-based market research firm noted.
Semico expects to see NOR return in force next year with revenues approaching US$9 billion ($11.7 billion), jumping to a peak of more than $12 billion ($15.6 billion) by 2008.
Jim Handy, Semico’s director of non-volatile memory services says in a statement, “Semico expects to see a correction in the second half of 2005 that will reverse 2004’s sharp NOR price decline, a decline that started with a mid-2004 supply/demand imbalance”.
“Unit and megabyte demand are still solid, so 2005’s revenue decline will largely be offset by growth in 2006,” he adds.
The leading NOR suppliers Intel , Spansion (distributed by Crest Technologies ), Sharp, STMicroelectronics, Renesas (Hitachi ), SST, Atmel (Soanar ) and Macronix, will see a return to profits, while OEMs, like mobile phone companies, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson, leading data processing OEMs like Dell, IBM, Apple and HP, and contract manufacturers such as Flextronics, Jabil, Sanmina-SCI and Solectron, will slowly lose the upper hand in price negotiations, Semico believes.
“Such turns are inevitable, and it is critical to properly time transactions around them. This report helps to remove uncertainty about these market cycles’ timing and effects,” Handy remarks.
NOR is used in applications ranging from PCs and peripherals through myriad consumer electronics devices and into the automotive and telecom spaces, the firm concluded.
2-Sep-2005