Kingston maintains leadership in SSD shipments: how do we do it?

Hello, Habr! Today we have a great reason to boast of our achievements in terms of global supply of our own SSDs. Despite the decadent market sentiment due to the spread of the coronavirus, we find opportunities to remain the first.

2019: strong market leadership

A couple of days ago, the Kingston U.S. unit published a press release on the Internet that talked about the high sales growth rates of our solid-state solutions throughout 2019. Such conclusions can be made by the reports of analytical companies Forward Insights and TRENDFOCUS , which recorded Kingston's leadership in the market of solid-state solutions in last year's quarterly reports and annual report.



Let's plunge a little into these numbers. So, according to the first report by Forward Insights, in 2019, Kingston took the first place in the world in terms of channel sales of solid state drives with a market share of 18.3%. In addition to Kingston, Western Digital and Samsung were among the three leaders with a market share of 16.5% and 15.1%, respectively. The second Forward Insights report calculates SSD shipments as part of channel sales: in it, analysts said that in 2019, Kingston sold nearly 120 million solid-state drives around the world.



But if we talk about the total volume of global supplies, then here TRENDFOCUS analysts put Kingston in third place after Samsung and Western Digital. According to the agency, in 2019 Kingston sold 276 million drives across all sales sectors. In addition, TRENDFOCUS notes that the demand for flash memory during 2019 remained very high, which contributed to the growth of sales of solid state drives and the strengthening of Kingston's position in world markets.

This is really a great success for us. As you recall, in 2019, the Kingston drive portfolio expanded: it added three new SSDs for the client sector and five flash drives for the data center. By the way, two of these five corporate solutions received the VMware Ready certificate (we talked about it in more detail in one of our materialson "Habré"). And in 2019, we introduced the first U.2 solution in the face of the NVMe PCIe drive DC1000M . Such a significant expansion of product lines allowed us to successfully compete in various fields of supply and offer customers products for every “taste” and need.

2020: Kingston still holds first place

It would seem that in 2020 it will be much more difficult to maintain the growth rate. Everyone thought that the demand for drives (and not only drives) will fall significantly. Fortunately, these predictions turned out to be erroneous. Closing the first quarter of 2020, we analyze statistics and see that the demand for SSDs remains high.

They wondered: why is this happening? Well ... we did not have to search for answers for a long time. The fact is that IT corporations and the OEM sector continue to develop in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and at a fairly rapid pace. Forward Insights analysts also noted that demand in the channel sales segment in 2020 remains very high. At the same time, total sales since 2018 increased by 36%.



A couple of paragraphs above, we have already noted that the portfolio of our drives has seriously increased in the number of competitive offers. New storage devices appeared in the M2 form factor: Kingston A400 , A2000 , KC2000 , which became a good margin of safety: the expansion of the product line coupled with wide distribution capabilities allowed Kingston to add gas to the supply market and continue to increase sales of storage devices.

Assessing the market situation for the first quarter of 2020, the vice president of TRENDFOCUS expressed the opinion that the rate of supply of SSD drives for home users and the corporate sector will remain high throughout the year. In addition, analysts predict continued demand for SATA SSDs. The latter, by the way, are still used in data centers (DPC) along with NVMe solutions.

Largely due to this continuing need for corporations in SATA drives, Kingston continues to strengthen its position in the client sector. However, NVMe-drives should not be discounted, because they are no less popular, both in OEM and in the consumer sector. Therefore, in 2020, Kingston will continue to bring to the market the latest in the M.2 and U.2 form factor to meet the needs of partner production and corporate customers.

In particular, emphasis will be placed on the promotion of such drives as Kingston SSD DC1000B M.2 (2280) NVMe with 64-level 3D TLC NAND memory and Kingston SSD Grandview M.2 NVMe PCIe gen 4.0. We also plan to focus on the wider distribution of our flagship Kingston KC600 and Kingston KC2500 devices. Over time, we will tell you more about them on Habré, so stay with us and stay tuned for new publications.

I want to end our success story with the words that 2020 promises to be very interesting. We have a lot of ambitious plans and aspirations, which include not only the release of new drives and maintaining leadership positions, but also increasing the separation from competitors, as well as further strengthening Kingston's position in client markets.

For more information on Kingston Technology products, visit the company's official website .