1HJan. NAND Flash avg. contract price partially remains flat and mild 1-6% decline due to market consolidation  

1HJan. NAND Flash avg. contract price partially remains flat and mild 1-6% decline due to the new-year vacation effect and severely cold climate in some northern hemisphere area that some customers’ operation has been impact. Downstream clients’ procurement transaction activities thus have been slow. That is, inventory replenishment demand has not been significantly resumed in early January. 1HJan. NAND Flash contract price shows the mild decline and flat under the consolidated market sentiment.

Given some US & Europe areas suffering from the snowstorm during Christmas hoildays, NAND Flash related product sales condition for year-end hot-season period have roughly met with most downstream clients’ expectation, so their inventory level remain reasonable in early January. Therefore, end-product customers temperately did not have the strong incentive to restock more NAND Flash recently. Also, NAND Flash suppliers and buyers will determine their following supply and procumbent strategy depending on the new NAND Flash application products launched by some electronics system customers in January. Therefore, NAND Flash market demonstrates the inactive condition given the observing view toward the new NAND Flash market development trend during January.

As market expect the NAND Flash related product demand of Chinese Lunar New Year holidays to remain sustainably steady in 2010, NAND Flash suppliers anticipate downstream customers’ inventory replenishment movement to gradually warm up in 2H January while pricing momentum will be reinforced as well. We thus expect NAND Flash price to keep relatively stable in the short term. However, NAND Flash price will likely further rebound if new orders from some electronics system customers and inventory replenishment effect for Chinese Lunar New Year holidays are better than market expected.