Samsung SSDs Lead the Global Market, Intel is a Distant Second

Samsung finally has reason to be optimistic about its semi-conductor business.

Last year, Samsung led the global solid state drive market and had double the market share of its arch rival Intel, which is the biggest semi-conductor corporation. With Intel’s massive experience in the field of semi-conductors and memory chips, overtaking Intel by such a large margin is a big feat by Samsung.

According to the market research firm IHS, SSD is market is being led by Samsung Electronics. Samsung had about $4 Billion in sales in 2014 which earned it a global market share of about 34 percent. Intel posted earnings of about $1.99 Billion in the same period and got a market share of 17 percent.

Intel managed to increase sales by 50 percent and this prevented it from being overtaken by SanDisk. On the other hand, Samsung increased sales by an even higher 53 percent last year. These increased sales could be attributed to its new V-NAND (Vertical NAND) based SSDs. The new technology allows increased storage capacity via stacked NAND cells instead of employing smaller manufacturing process to reduce semiconductor size.

IHS expects Samsung to increase its lead further this year and get 35% market share. Intel is expected to maintain its 17 percent hold of the market while 2016 is expect to widen the gap even further with Intel losing its market share even more.

Samsung has been aggressively strengthening its lead position in the SSD market with the help of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express) based SSDs and portable SSD T1. The 3-bit VNAND has also helped the cause and could become a game changer as smaller manufacturing processes become increasingly difficult to implement.

SSD demand is expected to grow from 83 million to 220 million in 2019 as HDD demand deteriorates from 442 to 389 million within the same period.