Fast technology May 17, the news, the recent one or two years, flash chip prices are falling, resulting in SSD price has been as low as 200 yuan 1TB cabbage price, also let several major flash manufacturers profit plunge, the latest rumor of the United States and Japan's Kaixia plan to merge.

Xidu acquired Sandi a few years ago to enter the flash memory chip market, Kaixia's predecessor is Toshiba Semiconductor, the latter is not only the inventor of NAND flash memory, but also with Sandi joint venture research and development, production, but before the two are independent operation, now the combination of quite a bit of a long will be divided, divided and long taste.

According to previous information, the merger plan formulated by Western Digital and Kaixia, after this merged entity,Kaixia will hold 43 per cent, West Digital 37 per cent and existing shareholders of the two companies will hold the remainder.

Why did the two sides merge? At present, the plunge in flash memory and SSD prices is the trigger, which leads to the plunge in revenue and profit of both parties. However, the fundamental reason for the integration of the two companies is that they worry that with the decline in performance, the cash flow of the companies will be affected, leading to the inability to maintain the huge investment every year, and eventually the stock price will fall, be abandoned by investors, and the company will go bankrupt.

An example of this is Japan's Elpida, which used to be the largest memory chip supplier in Japan and the third largest in the world, next to Samsung and SK Hynix, and with a higher share than Micron.

But Elpida, which also suffered from PC weakness, a plunge in flash memory prices, five consecutive quarters of losses and a merger with Micron,The merger was derailed by the unexpected death of Micron's then-CEO and the company filed for bankruptcy in February 2012.

The collapse of the world's third largest memory chip giant has also made Japan lose its core competitiveness in the field of memory chips. Kaixia's flash memory chip is now the only Japanese player in this market. If it goes bankrupt, Japan's position will obviously be affected.

If Kaixia and Xidu merge, it will also change the memory chip market, with their combined share of 31.7 percent, close to Samsung's 33.4 percent.

SK Hynix acquired Intel's flash memory business and formed Solidigm, a joint venture that operates independently. However, if SK Hynix and Solidigm are combined, the share of the two companies is about 30%.

The future global flash market pattern is almost Samsung, Kaixia + Xidu, SK Hynix +Solidigm,And a little bit for Micron.

Of course, the biggest variable in this market is the rise of Chinese storage manufacturers. In the past two years, many people have seen the influence of domestic flash memory + domestic main control SSD drives. In time, the market pattern will be reshuffled again.