“Consumers are using cloud [storage] services more and more and but they target different needs to the USB drives and memory cards. As far as I’m concerned, they are not mutually exclusive,” Gabriel Gidea, development director of Kingston Technology Romania and Bulgaria, told ZF.
“It is still pretty easy to use a USB flash drive. I am not surprised that we’ve seen an upward trend of USB flash drive sales at Kingston and on the entire market in the past two years. Sales volume was up 20% in 2014 compared with the previous year.”
The upward trend continued in the first half, when sales of USB drives rose by 15% in volume, he added.
USB flash drives were introduced about 15 years ago and replaced floppy disks and CDs as storage media for various types of data.
Consumers generate most sales of USB flash drives and the average storage capacity is 32 GB.
“I don’t expect USB flash drives to go away any time soon, but remain at least at the same level in the next two or three years,” Gidea said.
The surge in smartphone and tablet sales led to the introduction of USB duo drives, OTG (On-The-Go) USB flash drives that can be used with both phones and tablets and on PCs.
“The OTG drives are a growth factor for the USB flash drive segment. Kingston launched the micro duo USB flash drive in the first half last year and so far tens of thousands of units have been sold. I expect the OTG drive sales volume to double year by year.”
Another storage and data transfer option are the memory cards used in mobile phones, tablets and photo cameras. Sales thereof have been constant at about one million units a year in the last few years, and the most popular are the 32 GB and 64 GB models.
Kingston is the market leader on both segments, in terms of value and volume, accounting for 38% of the USB flash drive market and for 35% of the memory card market.
USB flash drives and memory cards generate about 35% of Kingston’s revenue in Romania, while the RAM memory modules (used in PCs) generate 38%.
“The PC memory module market has been rather constant in the past three years because the PC component market has been flat. On the other hand, the gaming component market surged,” the Kingston official said.
PC memory module sales stand at 200,000 – 250,000 units a year, 35% to 40% of which are gaming models.
Kingston also sells SSD (solid-state drives used for data storage and intended to replace hard disks) in Romania. SSD sales in this country amount to more than EUR10 million a year, according to Kingston Romania estimates. SSDs generate about 27% of Kingston’s revenue in this country.
“SSD sales on the local market doubled in 2013 compared with 2012 and last year increased by 75%. The market will definitely grow by at least 50% this year. I expect sales to exceed 100,000 units by yearend. In about two years SSD drives will sell as many units as internal hard drives.”
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)