Part of the sofftness of the ITC market I’ve pointed to before is due to a fall in the shipped capacity of storage. I wanted to share some of the advanced research I conduct to highlight this area. My Figure above shows the quarterly shipped capacity of the three most important types of raw storage device.
My Figure above shows worldwide storage capacity shipments in Exabytes for each of the major types – Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), NAND chips (used for flash memory devices) and DRAM (used for computer memory and in-memory databases and applications). Of course production of these devices was interrupted by the pandemic when a number operations had to be suspended and supply chains were significantly disturbed. The resultant shortages in these components then led many suppliers of PCs, smartphones, tablets, servers, storage arrays and IoT devices to over-order them as the lock-downs receded.
In Q2 2023 the fall in spending on these devices was the worst of the 30 ITC offerings I study continuously. In the past there have been significant drop-offs in spending in the expectation of new products about to be launched, or due to specific problems experienced by one or other of the relatively small number of manufacturers.
Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years., according to Wikipedia. In the solid state disk market each generation of manufacturing (measured in the size of the process measured in nanometers) has given significant cost/performance advantages over the previous best. Similarly there have been breakthroughs in the disk market with the minimizing of the size bits can be recorded onto their platters. Both solid state and disks have taken advantage of increases in horizontal layering. The result has often been exponential growth of storage capacities (see the bold lines in my Figure below).
There was a pause in the growth of shipped storage capacity in 2011-12, before high growth continued once more. The current fall in shipped capacity began in 2021 is continuing in 2022. So we need to think about whether it is a pause for a couple of years (as it was in 2011) or the start of a new period of much weaker annual growth. My forecast (the dotted lines in my Figure above) is for a long term slowdown in growth. What do you think? Let me know.