The business to be in this year seems to be the manufacture of flash memory chips. We’re only into the first few day of March 2010 but already there is talk of a worldwide shortage of flash memory chips.

Why? Well, several events have come together to create a huge supply vacuum the most notable of which are:

	Apple’s iPhone uses Flash Memory chips and market forecasts suggest they will sell around 33million iPhones in 2010 and Apple have apparently been very canny with their suppliers and “locked them in” with guaranteed future orders. Who can blame them after all the iPhone has been a runaway success and they have the cash reserves behind them to ensure forward continuity of supply.
	Sales of mobile phones that contain NAND (memory) flash chips are expected to top 700 million in 2010.
	The success of other consumer products like electronic book readers, camcorders and of course the ubiquitous flash memory stick continues to grow apace.
	Unusually this year many employees of the smaller support factories/companies have been slow to return from their Chinese New Year holidays and this has resulted in production backlogs.

For the manufactures like Toshiba, Micron Technology, Samsung, Hynix and Intel this is explosion in demand is great news but it will put a huge amount of pressure on their production capabilities this year just to keep up.

For suppliers of branded USB memory sticks and their partner factories the challenge will be ensure the continuity of supply during 2010 and to ensure this supply is at a price that the market will bear. Expect some turbulence in the supply this year and as usual shop around to ensure you get the best deal you can and in timeframes that suit your project, event or activity.

Tags: Branded USB, Branded USB Memory Sticks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Branded Memory Sticks, Branded USB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.