I wouldn't worry about Intel getting into the flash business. This is a 5 billion market by Year 2000 according to Dataquest and I don't suppose that Sandisk is going to get it all. Nevertheless, Sandisk has cornered 80%-90% of the digital camera, cell phone, and PDA markets, the three most important ones. Like I have argued in the previous posts, if a company can make into standard a removable part of a consumer electronics product, be it a video tape, a floppy disk, a Zip disk, or a flash memory, then that company will have the business for at least the next ten years. It's safe to assume that the digital camera, cell phone, and PDA markets are completely dominated by Sandisk.
The other important market is the embedded system market, especially consumer electronics (web-tv, settop box, answering machine, etc). The embedded system may have flash that is not removable and is buried inside a circuit board. It's a little bit more difficult for Sandisk to also dominate that market because a flash standard is harder to establish or not required. But there are still a few factors in favor of Sandisk:
- Sandisk flash is supported by Windows CE.
- Sandisk has the capability to bring to market higher storage capacity and cheaper flash memory than the competition.
- Sandisk has the knowledge to make miniature flash chips as demonstrated by the MMC. |
