Toshiba Cuts NAND Flash Production by 30 Percent

NAND suppliers getting butt hurt that their product has become essentially a "raw material" and no longer considered to be the more valuable finished product it once was.

Instead of pushing emerging markets such as the SSD market by building more Fabs, they're just going to limit those markets by lowering production output to jack up the prices and costs, which have been steadily declining. So instead of doing things to push production, they cut production back and jack up the price and hurt said emerging markets.

You want to make flash more profitable? Build bigger SSD's and make them more affordable. Especially with hard drive prices being what they are right now, there is money to be made from SSD sales.

Or does Toshiba only make the crappy slow flash products that are found in most USB drives and such?

let's hope other nand flash maker fill toshiba market share, so toshiba can suck its price fixing scheme

No other manufacturer is going to fill this gap. About a month ago, Samsung, the largest producer of NAND, and Toshiba agreed to cut back on expanding production. Micron can step it up a bit, but they are not big enough to make up for a larger company cutting 30% of its production.

There isn't much of an issue here. Obviously, people want cheaper NAND, but companies want a profit. Samsung recently claimed losses in the NAND and RAM production departments of its company. RAM is a terrible market to be in right now for the very same reason NAND is becoming terrible. There is more supply than demand. We are not in a situation where NAND devices are unobtainable, we are in a situation where it is not profitable to produce NAND. The worst case would be if one of these large producers to just drop out of the industry altogether. If people actually start buying SSDs instead of waiting for the price to decline or swapping old SSD's into their new computers, there would be no reason for production cuts.

Intel doesn't create a new processor and then sell it cheaper than their last generation processors. The stability in the price of processors makes that market incredibly profitable. Numerous SSD reviewers have said that upgrading to an SSD is the single most beneficial computer upgrade you can perform. Yet, people are more willing to spend $200 to upgrade their processor for a 10-20% increase in computational performance than they are to spend $150 on an upgrade from an HDD to an SSD that provides a much more noticeable improvement to performance.

The NAND industry is looking for more stability in their market. With prices declining on a weekly basis, most people are just waiting for them to hit rock bottom before buying an SSD. No point in buying something today if I can buy it next week for less money, or next month for significantly less. That waiting period is not survivable for the business trying to sell it to you. A more stable system would involve decreasing the price/GB as new process technology is implemented that allows more storage capacity per sq. inch of silicon. If the price of 128GB drives were to change every 6 months instead of every week, people would be less inclined to enter that never ending waiting cycle.

The idea that a company would intentionally hurt an emerging market that it has billions of dollars invested in is foolish.

@Thunderfox: Toshiba produces some of the fastest NAND available (Toggle DDR 2.0), along with Samsung. I don't know how far along Micron is with its next generation NAND (ONFI 3.0). I've only heard of the new top performing NAND being marketed for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).

sykozisSo, in other words....they've produced enough to allow prices to drop, so they're reducing production so they can attempt to justify price increases again later....
you dont get it. supply is so high, and demand is so low, that if production keeps happening, they could create so much there is no way to turn a profit from it.

everyone is right now tring to be the best and the cheapest, and they pushed the price way down.

bison88NAND suppliers getting butt hurt that their product has become essentially a "raw material" and no longer considered to be the more valuable finished product it once was.Instead of pushing emerging markets such as the SSD market by building more Fabs, they're just going to limit those markets by lowering production output to jack up the prices and costs, which have been steadily declining. So instead of doing things to push production, they cut production back and jack up the price and hurt said emerging markets.
get me the size in of a chip, the nm process used, gb on the chip, get me all that infromation and i can figure out about how much a gb of ssd space should cost.

ssds are expensive BECAUSE THEY USE SILICON WAFERS, 1 wafer is about 50000$ from beginning to end of the process, at least in the cpu side. this cost can ONLY come down because of

1) changes in the manufacturing process
2) shrinking of the manufacturing process.

intel is building a 450mm plant, this means that in the long run, their chips will get cheaper to make by up to 50%... i forget how much more space there is from a 300mm to a 450mm waffer.

just because they make a crap ton of memory, doesn't mean that it will be cheaper.

ThunderfoxYou want to make flash more profitable? Build bigger SSD's and make them more affordable. Especially with hard drive prices being what they are right now, there is money to be made from SSD sales. Or does Toshiba only make the crappy slow flash products that are found in most USB drives and such?
wrong you want to make it more profitable, you have to make the wafers bigger and shrink the process.

Did the manufacturers flood the market or is demand down?