Hye Yong: The consumer end of NAND's supply has been strained and will only get worse in 2027

On June 4th, the IT House reported that SSD prices were at an all-time high in the first quarter of 2026 against the background of high demand and undersupply of 3D NAND flash demand from the consumer end. At the same time, Silicon Motion achieved a growth in the earnings of SSD-controlled operations, particularly in high-end sales.

At the 2026 Taipei computer exhibition, Nelson Duann, Senior Vice-President of Hye Yong Client Operations, in an interview with Tom's Hardware, revealed that, despite the company's confidence in demand in the data centre area, the imbalance between supply and demand at the consumer end was expected to deteriorate further.

Our high-end controllers sell very well, including PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 controllers, UFS 3.1 and eMMC 4.1. However, the lower part of the business was under pressure as consumption demand declined. This compensates for the downside of the lower end controllers because of higher average prices. So we're still gaining momentum.

Financial data confirm this trend. In the first quarter of the year, the sales of Hyeung technology amounted to $342.1 million (IT House Note: The current exchange rate is about RMB 23.22 billion), with the ring growth of 23 per cent, or 105 per cent over the same period, with SSD controller sales increasing by 40 to 45 per cent over the same period. The company has successfully achieved double-up sales of consumer and enterprise-level controllers and, at the enterprise level, has benefited from strong demand in the data centre area, with its PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers significantly increasing their output.

However, the focus around client applications is on whether NAND flash-supply tensions can be alleviated in the short term. Duann gave a clear and pessimistic judgment about this.

For the second half of this year, I expect the situation will remain largely unchanged and the supply will remain very tight, with 2027 going to be the worst year. Looking ahead to next year, NAND manufacturers are very pessimistic. They told us that the supply situation could only be worse as cloud service providers and data centre operators continued to grow in demand. NAND suppliers therefore had no choice but to focus their supply on the data centre market.

This does not mean that the mainstream NAND manufacturers will not supply flashbacks to consumer-level applications at all and that new products will be released and shipped, but the supply-demand gap on this side is expected to widen further in 2027.

Duann added: “They still wish to retain a portion of the supply for consumer products, such as customer-based equipment, as well as a smaller share of vehicle-borne applications, but these allocations are not sufficient to change the overall situation”.

This is clearly not good news for consumers, but it may not be too bad for companies like Winnie Technology. SSD manufacturers may meet the volume demand by reducing single-disk capacity, which means that they will still purchase SSD controllers and, in some cases, even increase the volume of controllers.

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