Samsung Jumps Up to 41 Percent Market Share in DRAM

When people talk and write about solid-state data storage, most of the attention goes to NAND flash, NOR flash and static RAM.

DRAM (dynamic random access memory), which is present in just about every desktop, laptop, server and storage array in the world, is sometimes taken for granted or overlooked.

In DRAM news on Nov. 11, Samsung Electronics in the third quarter of 2010 became the only one of the world's top five DRAM suppliers to record revenue growth, according to a quarterly market report by research firm iSuppli.

The South Korean electronics giant solidified its domination of the market by selling $4.4 billion worth of DRAM in the third quarter, which was up 14.3 percent from $3.8 billion in the second quarter.

iSuppli reported that the next four largest suppliers all experienced declines in revenue.  Thus, Samsung's share of the market in the third quarter jumped to 41 percent, up six points from 35 percent in the previous quarter.

The company's double-digit growth was remarkable in light of overall DRAM market revenue in the third quarter, which actually declined slightly to $10.72 billion-down slightly from $10.78 billion.

"Samsung has been vocal about its desire to expand its DRAM market share to as high as 50 percent," said Mike Howard, senior analyst for El Segundo, Calif.-based iSuppli.

"The third-quarter results show Samsung has put its money where its mouth is. By investing heavily in expanding production and advancing its manufacturing technology, the company has been able to cut pricing and to eat into the market share of its competitors."

DRAM differs from static random access memory because it stores each bit of data in a separate capacitor within an integrated circuit.

Since real capacitors leak charge, the information eventually fades unless the capacitor charge is refreshed periodically. Because of this refresh requirement, it is a dynamic memory as opposed to SRAM and other static memory.