Earlier this week we reported that Samsung continues to maintain its position of dominance in the global NAND flash memory market as it saw its flash memory sales increase 34 percent last year. According to the latest data released by DRAMeXchange, Samsung more than doubled its market share gap with its closest competitor Toshiba in the fourth quarter of 2016.
Samsung Electronics remained first in the global NAND flash market with a market share of 37.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year on the back of $4.47 billion in sales which were up 19.5 percent from the previous quarter.
Data shows that Samsung increased its shipments in the final quarter by 11 to 15 percent, raised its average selling price more than 5 percent and ramped up its sales almost 20 percent. This allowed the company to maintain its lead in the high-capacity NAND market such as eMMC cards and SSDs.
Samsung's closest competitor in this space is Japan's Toshiba which is now in the process of selling its NAND semiconductor business due to a loss it has suffered in its nuclear power semiconductor business. Toshiba posted sales of $2.1 billion in the final quarter and accounted for 18.3 percent of the market.
It's interesting to note here that Toshiba led the NAND market in 2011 but it was overtaken by Samsung in 2012 and the latter has widened the gap since then so much so that its market share was double that of Toshiba in Q4 2016.
