Last week Micron and IBM announced that Micron would be IBM’s main supplier of NAND flash chips. The week before Micron announced a strategic agreement with Seagate to supply NAND flash. Why all this activity?
It comes down to today’s budding NAND flash shortage and the fact that suppliers tend to groom their customer lists when supplies get short.
Neither IBM nor Seagate represent the enormous opportunities that major consumer electronics firms like Apple do. Since many NAND suppliers are very cost-focused they look for customers that need very little support and purchase in high volumes.
IBM and Seagate look for a lot of support, and, since they both ship mostly enterprise flash systems or SSDs, they consume relatively small unit volumes of NAND flash chips.
These companies need to have an understanding of Continue reading “NAND Sourcing Changes as Supplies Tighten”