TAIPEI, TAIWAN: According to the DRAMeXchange, 1HNovNAND Flash contract price experienced a drop of roughly 0~5 percent; the rate of decline was smaller than what was seen during September and October. The drop is mainly attributed to NAND Flash downstream makers lowering their inventories in October.

As the market expects the downstream makers to begin stocking up again in preparation for the year-end holiday sales around mid-November, the NAND Flash price stabilized during early November, according to DRAMeXchange.

At the moment, with the supply of chips manufactured via the 5X nm manufacturing node increasing, the downstream makers have focused more in purchasing 8Gb and 16Gb MLC chips. Therefore, the drop in the TSOP 4G MLC reached roughly 11 percent, which was the highest among the other specs.

"Amid the persisting price drops starting from early September, the NAND Flash contract price could keep more stable in the short term, as the year-end holiday sales approaches," DRAMeXchange analysts said.

For the past several months, down stream memory card manufacturers of 1GB MicroSD were plagued by chip shortage, primarily due to a limited production output of the 8Gb die based on 5X nm technology. But with continued improvement in manufacturing process, DRAMeXchange anticipates the shortage will gradually abate by year end.

Memory card manufacturers previously produce 1GB MicroSD by stacking two 6Xnm, 4Gb dies. With the upstream process gradually shifting to 5Xnm, memory card manufacturers can now begin to switch to packaging a single 5Xnm 8Gb die and thereby achieve significant cost reduction. However amid yield problems plaguing the 5Xnm 8Gb dies for the past several months, downstream memory card manufacturers frequently have encountered a chip shortage.

As the yield problem of 5Xnm 8Gb chip is gradually resolved, manufacturers can now see some relief from their predicament the inability in meeting the strong demand from cell phone users and the coming peak season.