The Rise and Fall of Flash Drive Prices

The cost of the Nand memory chips that go in the ever popular flash drives and memory sticks has been steadily on the decrease over the year or so.

You can pritty much get hold of 2gb flash drives for cheaper than the cost of 1gb models this time last year.  Originally we were a little concerned that the decrease in price would overall reduce the profitability in selling flash drives and memory sticks.  In what is already a hugely cut-throat market keeping some sort of margin gets more and more difficult on far east imports, particually in the electronics markets.

However we have seen the trend steadily increase for greater memory sizes from 1gb being our best selling model to the 2gb’s and 4gb models. As what people tend to do is upgrade the memory sticks to double the capacity and transfer all of their data across to the new flash drives. This for us is a good thing as customers are always in need of new flash drives!

In what is quite a volatile market place at the moment flash drives have increased in price recently, the prices are generally more volitile as the dollar is currently so poor against the pound/Euro at the moment. Hopefully this situation will sort it’s self out when the economy has leveled off a bit from the current credit crisis.  The actual price of the NAND Chips has dropped from what we can makeout at the moment however the poor exchange rate is driving the end user prices higher.  News from the factories suggest that the American Flash drive market has slowed dramatically,  this in turn has reduced the cost of the drives to the UK market due to the old supply/demand laws. 

If the dollar exchange rate increases we will hopefully see a sharp decrease in the flash drive prices.

Moving into next year I can see the cost probably again halving by around august/september time,  this will in turn see the 4gb flash drives being sold for the price of the current 2gb flash drives and memory sticks.  Moving into the new year we can hope to see a lot more innovative usb products introduced into our range.