2022 – Memory Market Downturn – Is it the Canary in the Coalmine?

Will the oversupply shift to a rejuvenation of demand by late 2023 or 2024?  

MONTEREY, Calif., March 29, 2023 –
2022 was a year of high inflation and downturn for Flash, DRAM and some Non Volatile Memory. While the pandemic entered its third year the war in Ukraine overshadowed the return to normalcy on the pandemic economy. With the invasion of Ukraine oil prices rose along with food prices further exacerbated with the delivery backlogs carried over from 2021. Inflation rose to forty year highs. Over the course of the year Flash and memory shifted from a boom to a bust cycle as inflation and high energy prices wiped out disposable income used for electronics applications. This oversupply for some memory products reduced prices and deteriorated Flash revenues. As the supply of Flash wafers eased into an oversupply, there were still long lead times of some controller ICs and passives limiting the shipments of some high end semiconductors.

With the memory markets being the canary-in-the-coalmine as the harbinger of the economy the DRAM and to a lesser extent for Flash, moved into a downturn with Flash revenues around $64 billion, a decrease of -9.3% from 2021. Flash revenues have dropped over $6.5 billion since 2021. DRAM revenues fell -16.3% from $92.96 billion in 2021 to $77.762 billion in 2022.  Samsung, like every year was the 2022 revenue market leader for all NV Memories and NAND. Winbond reclaimed the NOR Flash leadership position who also held onto the serial NOR leadership position. STMicro reaffirmed the number one position in EEPROM, Infineon (Cypress) remained the NVRAM market leader.

This 2022 NVM Market Shares report discusses long term memory cycles including conditions leading to the current market predicament. We were in a memory supply expansion though with some IC shortages we are hoping for the long term rebuilding of demand to resuscitate the memory market. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated inflation. The slow transition to In-Memory Predictive Analytics Computing has been retarded due to Intel’s inability to deliver Optane memory. In July 2022, Intel decided to End-of-Life its Optane memory and related drives. Nevertheless, we are predicting strong demand for In-Memory Analytics use in the new associative computing paradigm.

The 2022 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor report, CS700MS-2023, includes market shares by vendor for total Non Volatile Memory, NAND Flash, NOR Flash, serial NOR Flash, SLC NAND, total EEPROM, serial EEPROM, parallel EEPROM, OTP ROM (EPROM and Mask ROM), and NVRAM (NVSRAM, RTC, MRAM, FeRAM/FeFET, PCM, XPoint, RRAM, NRAM and Others).  Annual revenue forecasts are provided from 2020-2027 for the EEPROM, OTP ROM, and NVRAM markets. In addition, the NVSRAM market shares are broken out by vendor for Real Time Clocks (RTC) and NVSRAM from 2017-2022.  This report, CS700MS-2023, is available for $2.5K and for providers of the market share data they can obtain the report with a $500 discount.  WebFeet Research also has forecast the NVSRAM (nvSRAM, RTC) from 2017-2027 by density for revenue, units, and ASPs. In addition, the serial EEPROM forecast by interface, revenue, units, and ASP by density is also available. Each additional forecast is priced at $500 and comes in excel format.  This report is vital for the seasoned memory professional as well as the casual market observer.

About WebFeet Research 
Headquartered in Monterey, California, WebFeet Research provides business consulting and market research services in the memory and storage markets, with a focus on nonvolatile memory, solid state storage technologies and cognitive computing.