SanDisk Taps Smartphone And Tablet Markets With World’s Fastest Memory Card

SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK), the maker of solid state drive (SSD) memory, flash cards and USB flash drives, announced a new microSDHC card which it claims is the world’s fastest memory card for smartphones and tablets. It asserts the new card loads applications faster, transfers files faster and improves responsiveness with up to 95MB/sec read speed and up to 90MB/sec write speed. The card is said to be ideal for multiple application processing such as games, video-recording and other memory intensive applications.

Dubbed SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDHC UHS-I, the card is designed specifically for smartphone and tablet users who want to boost storage capacity without compromising on performance and speed. ^[1]
See our full analysis on SanDisk

Betting On Next Generation Mobile Devices

Mobile phones are being increasingly used for recording and storing media such as video and photos. Research firm IDC forecasts that, by 2014, mobile phones will capture close to one-third of all video footage. ^[1] The new SanDisk card is designed to tap into this market, enabling customers to record high-definition videos, even in 3D.

IDC also forecasts that mobile phones will capture 525 billion images in 2012. SanDisk claims that its new card is ideal for mobile imaging applications, offering up to 90 MB/second write speed for capturing photos in burst mode, and file transfer speeds of up to 95 MB/second, which is much faster compared to transfer rates of 10-20 MB/second achieved by microSD cards in general.

SSD To Drive Future Revenues

SSD is cheaper to run, uses less power, is reliable and compact, even though the initial costs are high. It also processes information faster and performs more operations per second compared to hard disk (HD) drives. Demand for SSD storage will increase as more enterprises shift to flash storage as applications become more data-intensive and are deployed on the cloud.

If demand for SSD improves and SanDisk’s market share in the segment increases by 5 percentage points from our estimate of ~19% to 24% by the end of our forecast period, we can expect around 5% upside to our price estimate. We estimate SanDisk’s SSD memory division constitutes nearly 15% to the company value.

We have a $45.50 Trefis price estimate for SanDisk, about ~20% above the current market price.

Understand How a Company’s Products Impact its Stock Price at Trefis

1. SanDisk Press Release, www.sandisk.com, 19 June, 2012 [↩] [↩]