China Investigating Higher NAND Prices, Potential Price Fixing
0China Investigating Higher NAND Prices, Potential Price Fixing.
NAND storage prices weren’t great in 2017. Drives were significantly more expensive throughout the year than in 2016, and while prices came down somewhat in the later part of the year, they’re still running hot compared with 2014-2016. China is planning to investigate the situation, with an eye on how Samsung could potentially be manipulating the market.
“We have noticed the price surge and will pay more attention to future problems that may be caused by ‘price fixing’ in the sector,” Xu Xinyu, an official with the Pricing Supervision Department of the National Development and Reform Commission, told China Daily.
The jump in NAND pricing over the past 12-18 months has supposedly been driven by the shift from 2D NAND to 3D NAND. Unlike 2D NAND (also known as planar NAND), 3D NAND is stacked on top of itself to create layers of memory. Initially, we saw 32-48 layer stacks, but 64-layer 3D NAND has now launched with 96-layer demonstrated. In theory, this should drive NAND prices down over the long term, as it becomes more cost-effective to squeeze more and more storage into the same physical area. But converting over from planar NAND to 3D NAND has some costs associated with it, and supposedly those costs have driven up the price of NAND as a whole.
3D-NAND (general diagram)