What just happened? The global SSD market reportedly declined 10.7 percent last year, despite the resolution of master control IC supply issues that hampered production in 2021. Only 114 million units were said to have been shipped in 2022, with most of the decline affecting smaller suppliers.
The report, which comes from market research firm TrendForce, claims that the top five SSD brands increased their combined market share from 53 percent to 59 percent, mostly due to the falling prices of high-performance, high-capacity SSDs.
The report doesn't explicitly mention why the market declined last year, but it is apparent that the demand for SSDs remained weak in line with the shrinking market for PCs and computer hardware. TrendForce claims that the market sentiment "saw a swift turnaround" at the end of Q3 2022 due to aggressive production cuts by NAND Flash suppliers, leading to price increases across the sector.
The top three SSD brands last year were Kingston, ADATA, and Lexar, with the top two increasing their market shares compared to 2021. Kingston alone had a 28 percent market share globally, while the other two had 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Kimtigo, Netac, Colorful, PNY, Teclast, Gigabyte, and Transcend rounded out the top-ten, while the remaining players together accounted for just 24 percent market share.
Looking at 2023, the report says that the big players will likely remain dominant, but the overall market could remain depressed due to the struggling global economy. However, there's no mention of the year-to-date stats, so we don't know whether the market managed to recover after a slow 2022 or if it's still struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels.
SSD prices have been gradually decreasing over the past couple of years, allowing consumers to upgrade from their older mechanical HDDs or add new high-capacity SSDs to their computers. However, with the suppliers cutting NAND Flash production, prices have started to stabilize in recent months, so folks wanting to buy a new SSD should get one during the ongoing Black Friday - Cyber Monday sale rather than wait any longer.
https://www.techspot.com/news/100914-global-ssd-shipments-declined-more-than-10-2022.html
