In the first quarter of 2017, as in the previous quarter, there was a deficit in the global market for NAND Flash memory chips. As a result, despite the seasonal factor, flash memory has risen in price: the average contract price of NAND Flash chips has increased by 20-25% compared to the end of 2016, analysts from DRAMeXchange, research company TrendForce.

Due to the increase in prices, specialists registered only a minimal decrease in revenue in the world market of flash memory in the start quarter of the year, which is traditionally considered the period of slowdown in the industry. In January-March, sales of NAND Flash decreased by 0.4% compared to the previous quarter and amounted to 11.9 billion US dollars.

The leader of the market was Samsung with a share of 35.4%. The South Korean giant earned over $ 4.2 billion on the NAND Flash release, having worsened the result by 5.8% on a quarterly basis. At the same time, analysts note a significant increase in operating margin from Samsung due to the expansion of production of SSD. According to DRAMeXchange estimates, in the past quarter more than 40% of the company's flash memory was spent on the production of solid-state drives.

Earlier, these same experts reported that Samsung took second place after Intel in the corporate SSD-drive market. The share of the South Korean vendor in deliveries was estimated at 25%, and Intel - at 40%.

"Intel has lagged behind Samsung in the development of 3D NAND technology, but it attracts customers by lowering prices and promoting its SSDs as complementary elements to Intel's server processors," the study said..

As for flash memory, second place in revenue from the sale of this product in the last quarter was taken by Western Digital (WD), which in 2016 acquired the company SanDisk. With its help, WD's contribution to global revenue in the NAND Flash market was $ 2.1 billion, or 17.9% of the total. Relative to the previous quarter, sales growth was 0.3%, and shares 0.1%.

Toshiba closed the top three with 1.96 billion dollars (-6.5%) and 16.5% (-1.

1 percentage points), followed by Micron, SK Hynix and Intel. All three vendors demonstrated a noticeable quarterly revenue growth. So, Micron improved the index by 11%, to 1.4 billion dollars, taking into account that its share rose from 10.6 to 11.9%. SK Hynix had a cash advance of 13.5%, to 1.3 billion dollars, and the share jumped 1.3 percentage points, to 11%. Intel recorded $ 866 million in revenue, which is 6.1% higher than the result of the previous quarter. As for the share, it rose from 6.8% to 7.3%.