China’s YMTC breaks into global top 3 flash-memory suppliers for first time

Chinese semiconductor company Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) has achieved a historic milestone by becoming the world's third-largest NAND flash memory supplier by volume, for the first time ever. Located in Wuhan, YMTC captured 14% of global NAND bit shipments in the second quarter, just narrowly beating out Japan's Kioxia.

Samsung Electronics led the global market with a 25% market share, while SK Hynix secured second place with 22%. YMTC's shipments increased 22% year on year and 5% quarter on quarter, thanks to growing demand from domestic electronics manufacturers and the production of its latest 3D NAND architecture. However, the company remains behind in terms of revenue, ranking fifth globally in NAND sales.

This is largely due to its heavy focus on lower-margin consumer products and a smaller presence in high-value enterprise solid-state drives (eSSDs), which command premium pricing. The shift towards eSSDs, driven by the surge in AI-driven data center storage demand, is expected to help YMTC close the gap. With the rise of artificial intelligence, enterprise solid-state drives (eSSDs) accounted for 48% of global NAND bit shipments in the second quarter, more than double their 26% share from a year ago.

Counterpoint Research predicts that eSSDs will make up more than half of all NAND bits shipped by the end of the year as AI workloads move from model training to real-time inference, requiring fast storage for frequently accessed data sets.