“Samsung Electronics has been dumping NAND flash with its customers since late February amid competition from SanDisk, and the situation is likely to become more severe this month, according to channel sources,” Josephine Lien and Esther Lam report for DigiTimes.
“With weaker-than-expected iPod nano sales this year, Samsung has been trying to maintain control over its inventory levels by dumping excess stock with memory module makers, according to sources at downstream players. Samsung is pushing its products hardest with companies that it has close ties with, but other firms are receiving attractive quotes from the memory maker as well,” Lien and Lam report. “Inventory pressure at Samsung has been further aggravated by price reductions from SanDisk.”
Full article here.
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Prepare for a stock price drop.
Share Holder.
Wow. Genius.
Nano may be gobbled up by the hard drive ipods. Stock may go up. We’ll see.
iPod sales are in-line or greater than forecast for this quarter according to every analyst report I’ve read so for… All this means is that hard drive iPod sales are greater than expected..
Samsung would definitely know what nano sales are…all those stock analysts are just pulling sales numbers out of their butts.
I don’t get a break out by model, but my personal channel checks don’t reflect a slowing in iPod sales overall.
Anecdotally, from comments received, it appears that iPods with video capability are more in demand than straight music players.
I’m not getting overly excited by Samsung’s price actions.
“Prepare for a stock price drop.”
maybe, but…
1. weaker vs. samsung’s overly optimistic predictions, not aapl’s
2. price drop benfeits appl too.
Actually lower NAND prices is very good news, even if caused by lower nano sales volume.
Much has been speculated about Apple introducing ‘instant on’ capabilities with the new Intel Macs. In order to do this Apple will require a great deal of NAND memory to store the OS (or at least minimum boot elements) in RAM. This is cost probhibitive at current NAND price points.
Competition from SanDisk (and soon from Micron/Intel) will further dampen NAND memory prices further, making it possible to expeand their use in computers and other devices. iPhone anyone?
Hang on are you suggesting that Samsung have specifically said that nano sales are down? May be the case but ‘channel sources’ are somewhat different and such sources have been wrong many times before, like in December most recently. Best to wait see I think.
I’m with you, spyinthesky.
How does anybody know what Nano sales are without Apple telling them? And Apple ain’t tellin’ nobody nothin’. As you point out, the “channel sources” (I love business speak) have been as wrong as wrong can be their last few attempts.
Besides, Apple has a huge contract with Samsung (isn’t it for $5 Billion worth) for memory?.
I think the real truth is that SanDisk has upset Samsung rather badly with their good memory sales, and (distant) #2 market position for memory based MP3 players. Samsung has made up a story to justify lowering their formerly high prices so it doesn’t look like they were gouging before.
Now, an interesting story would be about how all this affects the price that Apple has contracted.
This article is all screwed up.
1. Who lowered prices first? Sandisk or Samsung. The last sentence makes it seem like Sandisk initiated price reductions. Sandisk doesn’t sell any memory to Apple, so it’s lowering prices can’t be affected by sales of nanos unless Samsung initiated price reductions.
2. “according to sources at downstream players”, Samsung is pushing NAND at lowered prices. No evidence that Samsung says it was caused by slowing of nano sales. Maybe it was caused by everyone else dropping out of the knock-off flash player market…
3. In Jan, Apple projected greatly decreased nano sales in this quarter (compared to the Christmas quarter). Samsung would’ve known this.
3.
Lower NAND prices means Nano notebooks to come all that much sooner.
But that doesn’t matter because Mac’s will be running Windows by then.
The article suggests that the reason why prices have come down is that Sandisk have been assembling high capacity Compact Flash memory modules and selling them at prices which would appear to be lower than the price of the components within them.
It would appear that much of the extra demand has been for flash memory to be used within digital cameras.
Anyone else read about Intel using NAND memory designs in future rounds of portable computers?