The overview given by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, on the performance of the NAND flash market for 2Q19 finds that end demand in smartphone, notebook PC and server markets have recovered from the traditional offseason 1Q19, bringing total bit consumption growth to 15%. But since suppliers still have rather large levels of inventory on their hands, the drop in contract prices for 2Q19 have remained quite significant. Total business revenue remained around the US$10.8 billion mark, trending flat from 1Q19.
With consumers beginning to seek customization and autonomous consumption and the lack of labor becoming a growing problem at the manufacturing end, manufacturers are spurred to become adaptive to a quickly-shifting and widely-varying environment as manufacturing systems become more sophisticated than ever. Thanks to the ripened, new technology, manufacturers may deploy advanced sensing technology in conjunction with AI algorithms and robots to raise information visibility and system controllability, furthering the development of smart manufacturing for Industry 4.0. According to forecasts by TrendForce, the global market scale for smart manufacturing will register a CAGR of 10.7% up to 2022 and near US$370 billion.
According to investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, quote trends for various products, including commodity DRAM, server DRAM and consumer DRAM, fell by nearly 30%, with the exception of discrete mobile DRAM/ eMCP products, whose declines fell within the 10-20% range. Server DRAM prices suffered the steepest fall, registering a near-35% decline. Observing the market, we see that although 2Q sales bit grew over the previous quarter, quotes kept on falling, causing total DRAM revenue to fall by 9.1% QoQ in 2Q.
According to the latest notebook shipments report by TrendForce, concerns over the US-China trade dispute and the Intel CPU shortage originally casted a conservative cloud over the overall outlook for market in 2Q19. Yet three factors played a role in pushing 2Q shipments to 41.5 million units to give an expectation-exceeding QoQ growth of 12.1%: (1) AMD CPUs are being substituted for Intel CPUs; (2) Chromebooks find increased demand in the form of tenders; and (3) worries arising from the trade dispute moved brands to stock up anticipatorily.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, has just released contract prices for various products in July, in which we see contract prices still trending down overall, but those for mainstream products shrinking due to the Toshiba outage directly impacting production. Furthermore, Japan's modifications to South Korean-bound export regulations were also anticipated by the market to impact South Korea's NAND Flash supply. TrendForce suggests that Japan's move was merely the removal of South Korea from its white list, in which countries to receive favorable treatment were listed and with South Korea as the only Asian country listed in the past. South Korea will merely turn from a country receiving special treatment into a normal one, and South Korean semiconductor suppliers will have to go through the same proceedings as other Asian countries do. And since the Japanese government has already assigned additional personnel to speed up reviewing, this move probably won't be causing much of an impact.