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Samsung looks to storage

by on18 July 2013

Smartphones are dying

Samsung is looking to new storage tech to replace the revenue it is losing as the smartphone market dries up. Samsung has announced a range of SSD storage technology aimed at replacing computer hard disk drives.

According to Reuters, global demand for SSDs is expected to grow by 75 percent this year to 78 million units, while shipments of NAND chips for use in smartphones are expected to increase 41 percent, weakening from 44 percent last year and 58 percent in 2011, as smartphone sales growth starts to wane. What appears to be happening in the long term is that Samsung wants to drive down the cost of SSDs further. It is still too expensive to compete with hard-drives.

In the new Samsung range is a terabyte SSD Samsung which costs $650. This is average for an SSD but a same-capacity hard disk drive by biggest manufacturer Western Digital Corp sells for less than $100. Samsung is building a $7 billion chip plant in China, while Toshiba Corp and SK Hynix are also boosting production. This could see the price of SSDs fall rapidly to a point where they are a more consumer orientated option.

In the meantime Samsung is trying to get its SSDs into servers and storage systems.

SSDs are likely to account for nearly a quarter of total flash memory sales this year from 15 per cent this year, according to Daewoo Securities, and this proportion is set to rise to 45 per cent by 2015. Samsung accounts for around 40 percent of global NAND flash market and competes with Toshiba, Micron Technology and SK Hynix. In the SSD market, it competes with Toshiba, Sandisk and Intel.

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