From a note to clients by Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers that landed in my inbox Wednesday:
While we are unable to estimate Mac / MacBook flash consumption, IDC data leaves us to estimate Apple’s iPhone + iPad + Apple Watch alone have consumed as much as 30% of NAND Flash capacity shipped (no wonder Apple is involved in the potential Toshiba Memory Corp. sale). Apple’s decision to increase in the minimum capacity of the iPhone again 2017 to 64GB and only offer 256GB as the upgrade capacity should be an important investor consideration. This compares to Samsung devices at 7.5% of NAND flash capacity; 24% of total capacity when including Samsung’s SSD capacity shipped.
My take: I sometimes forget what a large shadow Apple casts across the industry.
30%. That’s more than Toshiba’s market share. Except for spreading risk Apple could have justified buying Toshiba without partners.
“Apple consumes 30% of the world’s flash memory”
Not bad for a “niche” player.
Maybe the definition of “niche” has been expanded to include “we don’t understand what they’re doing or how they’re doing it” and nobody told me.
Yep, Apple’s supply chain is the World. Easy for others to ramp up new products when they sell an order of magnitude less than Apple. For Apple, product ramps are like D-Day deployments.