Although the price of SSDs is generally falling, Samsung is considering an increase for its own products.
Samsung plans to make its own SSDs more expensive in the first quarter of this year. That’s what Digitimes knows on the authority of anonymous sources. We do not know an exact figure for the price increase. Samsung would be the only one wanting more pennies for its products, though. Because demand is currently lower than expected, other SSD makers are just looking to bring their price down by sometimes as much as ten percent. That should fuel sales.
Surprising
The move is quite surprising. Samsung is the market leader in memory manufacturing and can call on fully integrated manufacturing of SSDs. In other words, the company makes not just the NAND memory but the entire thing, controller included. Thus, you would expect Samsung to run higher margins than many competitors and thus reap the benefits of higher sales volumes more so than the rest of the market.
The Korean semiconductor specialist does struggle with the impact of Covid-19. An outbreak in China’s Xi’an is impacting two Samsung NAND plants. Output would be lower for the time being. The factories account for more than 42 percent of Samsung’s total NAND capacity and 15.3 percent of global manufacturing capacity.