Samsung said to use strong flash position to push MMCmicro platform
 

Samsung Electronics is aggressively pushing customers to adopt its self-developed MMCmicro card by pricing completed MMCmicro cards at similar levels to equivalent density NAND flash chips, according to industry sources. Customers will save costs on embedding extra controller ICs and performing assembly, observers stated.

Samsung was not available for comment at the time of publication.

In addition, six months after announcing mass production for the so-called smallest memory card for mobile phones, Samsung continues informing its customers about its NAND flash supply strategy, which is to give top priority to MMC card applications.

Although aggressively “educating” customers about this strategy, the memory maker does not refuse NAND flash supply for customers shipping SD cards, memory card makers stated. In fact, industry observers commented that the market share for SD cards should continue rising from its 40% share.

Increasingly more handsets are adopting memory cards, especially with the rise of multimedia handsets. SanDisk and Motorola are now the advocates of microSD cards, while Samsung has the support of Nokia for MMCmicro deployment, industry observers pointed out.

With the SD camp already claiming a solid market base, observers believe that Samsung’s aggressive push for MMCmicro cards will not shake SD’s place in the near term. However, with 50% of global NAND flash capacity, Samsung will have a strong influence in the choices made on the customer side, observers noted.

http://www.digitimes.com/bits_chips/a20050919A6029.html

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