NAND flash prices continue to fall in Q2

TrendForce estimates that NAND flash prices will continue to fall in the second quarter, by 5-10% sequentially, a slight improvement from the 10-15% decline in the first quarter, but are not expected to recover until the fourth quarter at the earliest.

The main reason for this situation is that although OEMs continue to reduce production, demand in markets such as servers, smartphones and notebooks has not picked up and the flash memory market remains in a state of oversupply.

If market demand remains weak, flash prices will have to fall further and there is no hope of a recovery this year.

For consumer SSDs, PCIe 3.0 is being phased out, vendors continue to slash prices to clear inventory, progress on new PCIe 4.0 products is slow, and PCIe 5.0 has a long way to go before it becomes popular.

QLC flash memory supply continues to decline, which has led to price reductions for TLC products, although the reductions are not significant in the short term.

With market demand yet to pick up significantly, consumer SSD prices are expected to decline by 5-10% sequentially in the second quarter, down from 13-18% in the first quarter.

In addition, enterprise SSD, eMMC and UFS products are expected to see price declines of 8-13%, 5-10% and 8-13% respectively in the second quarter.