IHS: SSD Market Won't Slide Due To Low Ultrabook Shipments
The near-term prospects for ultrabooks have dimmed significantly.
Although the solid state drives (SSDs) employed by the latest notebooks and other products have so many different uses and are relatively cheap, their growth outlook has decreased.
SSD shipments in the first half of this year amounted to 12.9 million units, according to the IHS iSuppli Memory & Storage Service at information and analytics provider IHS.
But the future doesn't look so bad.
Shipments reached 10.5 million in the third quarter and this is expected to escalate to 17.5 million units in the fourth, amounting to an immense 28 million units in the second half.
This is more than double the total of units shipped during the first six months of the year, as shown in the graph above. This is down from the previous forecast of 13 million in the third quarter and 20 million in the fourth.
It should be noted that the shipment numbers cover pure standalone SSDs.
In other words, units with no hard disk drives (HDDs) associated with them, as well as when the drives are used with HDDs as separate cache SSD entities. These numbers cover all applications for SSDs, including the enterprise segment, ultrabooks and other so-called ultrathin computers.
"Intel Corp. has not matched its ambitious goals for ultrabooks with the marketing needed to propel the platforms as a desirable, affordable alternative to conventional notebooks and tablets," says Ryan Chien, analyst for memory and storage at IHS.
"This has prompted IHS to lower its cache SSD shipment projection. However, pricing for SSDs has fallen well below the $1-per-gigabyte threshold, making their value proposition more attractive than ever. Because of this, SSDs are finding uses in other products, helping to compensate for the shortfall in ultrabooks."
IHS is maintaining an aggressive long-term outlook for SSDs due to NAND die shrinks, increasing utilisation of TLC flash, and controllers with more advanced flash management techniques that are accelerating the cost curve.
The second quarter of the year closed with 7.1 million SSDs being shipped for $1.5 billion in revenue.
And although cache SSDs did not meet expectations, traditional SSDs, including those for the enterprise market, with their higher prices encouraged the revenue slack.
By the second half of this decade, SSDs will be a de facto standard in non-budget notebook and desktop PCs, thanks to a mixture of lower prices, consumer education and an optimised software ecosystem.
IHS projects the SSD industry will finish 2012 with $7.5 billion in revenue and around 41 million of shipments, with compound annual growth rates of 35 percent and 69 percent, respectively.
