What is the current status of the storage market?

Entering 2021, global storage products will increase prices across the board. At the end of February, the prices of DRAM, memory modules, NAND Flash, and NOR Flash all increased. Take the price of memory as an example-DRAMeXchange data shows that as of February 3 this year, the price of 8Gb DDR4 memory particles reached 3.93 US dollars, and the price in August last year was only 2.54 US dollars.
 
In the second half of last year, problems such as epidemic control, power outages, capacity shortages, overbooking, etc. were highlighted. In addition, the production capacity of foundries was tight, the original fabs released fewer NAND Flash resources into the SSD channel market, and large manufacturers increased their inventory... The superposition of factors has a crowding effect on production capacity.
 
As PCs, 5G mobile phones, automobiles, and data centers continue to increase storage performance and capacity requirements, it is expected that the NAND flash memory industry will grow substantially in 2021. Demand for Client SSD master chips, eMMC/UFS master chips, and automotive storage Will also increase significantly.
 
This year, some storage master controllers raised the price of embedded master chips by 50%. Downstream terminal equipment manufacturers are also deeply affected by the increase in storage prices, because the price drop of SSDs has slowed down than expected, which will hinder the popularization of all-flash arrays in China to a certain extent.
 
Even if an 8-inch wafer production line is urgently added, it is difficult to see a significant increase in production capacity in the short term. Recently, TSMC announced the cancellation of the 3% discount for 12-inch wafer foundry. The industry speculates that 12-inch wafer production capacity will also be tight. Coupled with the increase in terminal demand, the storage industry chain may also face a tense situation before wafer production capacity has not eased.