2020 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor

2020 was a year of tragedy and regrouping for Flash, DRAM and Non Volatile Memory. While the pandemic ravaged the economy and shut down outside gatherings and normal activities, the stay-at-home virtual usage model sparked demand for the memory market to flourish. As the Coronavirus pandemic spread the impact on our lives and businesses created a duality living/working at home and when to venture out. How long this period of uncertainty will last before the world returns to normal depends on vaccinations. What we do know is that businesses are recovering despite the vague and ambiguous domain that the Pandemic has thrust them into. The most successful have been able to adjust their business operations to the virtual work environment. Incidentally, the industry's recovery is due in no small part to the increased demands born out of this situation.

The migration of the Coronavirus from China through tightly coupled trade channels proved to be the beginning of a global recession as lockdowns became a necessary precaution to stem the transmission of the virus. Having been through the DotCom downturn and the 2008 Great Recession it became quickly apparent that the Viral Pandemic had removed stabilizing market factors throwing the entire worldwide industry into crisis. The memory market recognized it was entering into a potential bust cycle and reacted by focusing on the stay-at-home consumer and supporting him through the cloud data center services. This inner duality of both the consumer and essential businesses carried enough volume to keep the memory markets prosperous through 2020. Irregardless, that the outer non-essential businesses, travel, tourism, schools and offices were shut down, the electronics industry contracted while keeping open operations even in the 1H 2020. At first purchasers were panic buying SSDs on fears that the virus would spread to the Flash manufacturers and production would cease. Fortunately, the Asian and Japanese manufacturers took high precautions and never were affected with shutdowns. Demand remained constant throughout the year. Still the contracted market especially for auto sales set the tone for under forecasting IC semiconductors needed in 2H 2020 and 2021. The net effect of panic buying and under forecasting led to shortages, a classic bust cycle that the memory industry has seen all too often.

Even with the massive price and revenue rebounds in DRAM and to a lesser extent for Flash, the 2020 Flash memory market performed better than expected with revenues above $58 billion, an increase of 21.5% from 2019. The NAND Flash market followed suit at 22.1% on $56.347 billion, while the NOR market rose from 2019 by 8.1 %. Samsung as usual was still the 2020 revenue market leader for all NV Memories and NAND. Winbond maintained the NOR Flash leadership position closely followed by Macronix and Infineon (Cypress) where Winbond also held onto the serial NOR leadership position. Kioxia maintained the SLC NAND Flash leader for Code Storage NAND. STMicro reaffirmed the number one position in EEPROM, Infineon (Cypress) remained the NVRAM market leader.

This 2020 NVM Market Shares report discusses long term memory cycles including the conditions leading to the current market predicament. We are in a memory expansion though when we will rebound from the shortages is an unknown based in part on boom bust cycles in the memory market. The transition from von Neuman computing (Memory and Storage) is it moving too slowly to Persistent Memory-centric computing or is it accelerating based on the computing need in science for better prediction using contextual associations. Finally, will the shortages subdue the emerging NVMs including XPoint.

“ The 2020 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor report, CS700MS-2021” , includes market shares by vendor for total Non Volatile Memory, NAND Flash, NOR Flash, serial NOR Flash, new this year SLC NAND, total EEPROM, serial EEPROM, parallel EEPROM, OTP ROM (EPROM and Mask ROM), and NVRAM (NVSRAM, RTC, MRAM, FeRAM/FeFET, PCM, XPoint, RRAM, NRAM and Others). Annual revenue forecasts are provided from 2019-2026 for the EEPROM, OTP ROM, and NVRAM markets. In addition, the NVSRAM market shares are broken out by vendor for Real Time Clocks (RTC) and NVSRAM from 2015-2020.