The annual growth rate of NAND flash memory demand may remain below 30% from 2022 to 2025

TrendForce recently released a report saying that with the slowdown in demand for solid-state drives from PC clients, it is expected that the annual growth rate of NAND flash memory demand will remain below 30% from 2023 to 2025.

Affected by previous work-from-home activities, consumer SSDs constituted the main driver of NAND flash market demand growth over the past two years. In 2022, 92% of laptops will be equipped with SSDs, and TrendForce predicts that the proportion will reach 96% by 2023.

At present, the average capacity of PC solid-state drives has exceeded 500GB, and the quotation of 512GB solid-state drives has also dropped significantly, which is about the price of 256GB solid-state drives half a year ago. Since the license fee of the Windows operating system is positively related to the device configuration, if the manufacturer equips a solid-state drive with a larger capacity, it will not only cost more to purchase the hard drive but also increase the system license fee.

Considering that the 128GB capacity market for entry-level notebooks has gradually declined, Microsoft encourages OEMs to equip UFS flash memory and believes that it may replace low-capacity solid-state drives in the long run. Compared with the SATA interface, UFS still has certain advantages in terms of the transmission rate. At present, the latest UFS 4.0 standard supports a maximum bandwidth of 5800MB/s, and even the 3.1 standard released in 2020 also supports a maximum bandwidth of 2900MB/s. However, TrendForce believes that UFS storage currently has no obvious price advantage over low-capacity SSDs, and OEMs may not respond positively.