Sandisk Jumps Into Tablet Market in a Flash

NEW YORK (Trefis) -- SanDisk (SNDK), the maker of solid state drive memory, flash cards and USB flash drives, announced a new microSDHC card 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/second read speed and up to 90MB/second write speed. The card is said to be ideal for multiple application processing such as games, videorecording 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.

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. 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 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 Revenue

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 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 approximately 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.

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