If IDC's bearish forecast materialises, then more Flash memory makers will have to declare bankruptcy
For a change, research firms agreed to disagree in forecasting the emergence of the solid-state disk (SSD) drive market.
During a panel hosted today at the Flash Memory Summit conference in Santa Clara, Calif., small technical research firm Forward Insights blasted its larger competitors (including IDC and Gartner) for their hockey-stick-like projections of the SSD market.
But first, to set the stage, IDC research manager in hard-disk drive (HDD) components and solid-state disk (SSD) drives Jeff Janukowicz said he expects the SSD market to reach $3 billion in sales next year, compare to $733 million in 2008 and less than a billion dollar this year.
IDC’s forecast will lead Flash memory makers to bankruptcy
A bearish growth that for Janukowicz will be mostly driven by enterprises adopting SSDs to improve the performance and lower the consumption of their data centres and by early-adopters in the PC market like gamers in the desktop segment or executives’ laptops.
Here’s a video excerpt of Janukowicz remarks:
Great outlook, right?
Well, not really according to Forward Insights President Greg Wong who thinks that this kind of hyper growth can not be done in a profitable way.
“If you take a look at the industry right now, profitability is a big challenge for everybody. So where will they get the money to invest and expand at the big growth rate that you see here [pointing at competitors' forecasts]… wether its through technology migration, plus 3-bits per cell, plus 20% CAPEX. That’s what you need to achieve those rates that [competitors] are predicting for next year. If you believe that it’s feasible, then I guess you’ll have to use their projections… And even if demand is quite strong next year, where will they get the cash?,” explains Wong.
A more prudent sentiment that was echoed during the conference by Sandisk CEO Eli Harari and Samsung vice president of memory marketing Jim Elliot.
In this video excerpt Wong explains his opposing arguments to the explosive growth of the Flash memory market:
[...] Forward Insights Challenges IDC “Hockey-Stick” SSD Sales Forecast … [...]
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