In September, NAND prices fell by 1~10%. Market expects rebound in October

DRAMeXchange pointed out that the mainstream NAND Flash contract price fell about 1-10% due to the quarter-end effect in the second half of September 2010. However, various suppliers have different pricing strategies due to different customer and order status. In the latter half of September, the demand for the memory card and UFD customers was flat due to the retail market, and the demand for October holiday covering from some routes in China also showed diminishing. With the consideration of higher inventory levels, some memory card customers settled at the end of the 3Q quarter. The previous purchase intention is not too high. In total, the NAND contract price in September fell by 1 to 10%. The market expects a rebound in October.

In addition, due to the high proportion of customers on the memory cards, some suppliers have continued to downgrade some contract prices in late September in order to assist their customers’ recent promotions to stimulate the purchase of memory cards and UFD’s retail market. Boosted customers' willingness to purchase and reduced their inventory at the end of the quarter, but some suppliers have only slightly adjusted their long-term orders for systems products or have already lowered their prices in early September. As a result, they were only slightly in late September. Reduce the price of some products or maintain a flat price.

It is expected that the NAND Flash market will continue to be affected by the following factors in the short term:

1. Some system product customers before Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday will launch new smart phones and tablet computers with higher NAND flash storage capacity, which will help ease the relatively flat 4Q10 purchase requirements of memory cards and UFD customers.

2. Most 3Dnm & 2xnm new processes and TLC output of NAND Flash suppliers will continue to increase in 4Q10, but some suppliers may also consider that they may slightly slow output growth in response to the impact of 1H off-season.

3. Some NAND Flash suppliers have continued to significantly lower the contract price in September to stimulate downstream customers in the 3Q season. They also expect that the demand for year-end holiday stocks of downstream customers will return from mid-October to early November. Wen, therefore, we expect NAND Flash prices to remain relatively stable or partially declining in the short term.