Key facts
- YMTC is now the third-largest global NAND flash supplier by shipment volume, overtaking Kioxia.
- Samsung Electronics remains the top NAND flash supplier, holding a 25% market share.
- SK Hynix secured second place with a 22% share, boosted by Solidigm's performance.
- YMTC's shipments surged 22% year-over-year, achieving a 14% market share.
- Server eSSDs accounted for 48% of total NAND shipments in Q2, driven by AI workloads.
- SK Hynix is the largest shareholder of Kioxia through its investment in SPC2.
Chinese memory chipmaker Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. Ltd. (YMTC) has surpassed Japan's Kioxia Holdings Corp. in the second quarter to become the world's third-largest supplier of NAND flash by shipment volume. This development highlights the expanding global presence of Chinese semiconductor manufacturers amid a prolonged memory-chip shortage.
Samsung Electronics maintained its leading position in NAND flash memory shipments for the second quarter, holding a 25% market share. SK Hynix, including its subsidiary Solidigm, secured second place with a 22% share, driven by a significant quarter-over-quarter surge in shipments from Solidigm. YMTC achieved a 14% share, marking its first time in the global top three, with shipments jumping 22% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter.
YMTC's rapid ascent is attributed to its aggressive volume ramp-up in a supply-constrained environment and its success in mass-producing 267-layer 3D NAND flash, while also increasing supply to Chinese OEM clients. The company is developing stacking technology exceeding 300 layers using its proprietary 'Xtacking' architecture. However, YMTC's revenue ranking is fifth, as its product portfolio is heavily concentrated in consumer applications with fewer high-value data center enterprise solid-state drives (eSSDs).
The NAND market in Q2 was characterized by explosive growth in demand for server eSSDs, fueled by AI workloads migrating from training to inference. Server eSSDs accounted for 48% of total NAND shipments, nearly doubling their share from the previous year. This trend contributed to an all-time high in industry revenue.
In a related development, SK Hynix has become the de facto largest shareholder of Kioxia. Through a special purpose company (SPC2) in which SK Hynix invested, it holds a 14.19% stake, slightly edging out Toshiba's 14.12%. This change stems from Toshiba's successive offloading of its stake in Kioxia.