TrendForce today released a report stating that the penetration rate of Client SSDs in notebook computers is expected to reach 92% in 2022 and about 96% in 2023.
According to the report, as the “home economy” effect of the epidemic recedes, coupled with the overall poor economy leading to a sharp freeze in demand for consumer electronics, Client SSDs will be the product with the most obvious slowdown in demand in the future, which in turn will limit the overall NAND Flash demand growth in terms of bits, with the annual growth rate expected to be less than 30% from 2022-2025.
In terms of capacity, the capacity of Client SSDs in laptops will exceed 500GB in 2022, and 512GB Client SSDs will be similar to the 256GB price quoted six months ago after the recent rapid price drop, and even close to the same capacity HDD, making PC OEMs speed up the adoption of 512GB capacity, but it may be difficult to upgrade to 1TB or more SSD configuration.
In terms of low capacity, the report says UFS may also replace low-capacity Client SSD usage in the long run. However, TrendForce believes that due to the recent decline in SSDs, the price difference with UFS has narrowed, and platform hosts are not yet able to natively support UFS 3.1 speeds, so PC OEMs do not see much incentive to import UFS without a significant price advantage.
TrendForce estimates that the overall Client SSD demand bit growth rate will be 4.3% and 11.6% in 2022-2023, and the average capacity growth rate will drop from 18.2% in 2022 to 9.6% in 2023.
