A downhill price trend for NAND Flash chip has continued into this week (November 2-6) as most buyers hold their procurement upon a pessimistic price projection ahead. Memory card ASP, on the contrary, is relatively stable despite some vendors have released more finished cards to channels.

Channel demand is sluggish as most buyers seem already completed inventory pre-stock for the upcoming holidays, even including Christmas. Since most buyers expect the downhill trend to persist throughout the entire Q4, some thus hold their procurement, leaving a weak market sentiment.

Not only prices of the mainstream density chip are falling, but also low-density chips. We observe that some 8Gb MLC NAND Flash chips are being dumped in China. Since quotation of these chips is as low as USD5.x, overall ASP of 8Gb chip thus remains weak.

Industry players are aware that more “white-box” microSD cards from SanDisk are available at channels, with most of them in 2GB density. As these cards from SanDisk carries a price difference of USD0.30-0.40 with its competitors, we think the competitive pricing is backed by a better cost structure from its 3bit/cell NAND Flash.