In fact, one of their incentives may be simply to avoid making royalty payments to SanDisk for MLC and possibly TLC.
Not so, according to Judy at Analyst Day.
Unknown Analyst
As your competitors move from 2D to 3D NAND, how should we think about your licensing business? Are you going to be able to, your existing deals, encompass those new 3D technologies get to the back and renegotiated? Or is there some kind of other cost maybe we should be thinking about?
Sanjay Mehrotra - Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President, Director and Member of Special Option Committee
Judy?
Judy Bruner - Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President of Administration and Member of Secondary Executive Committee
So I'll take that. Our primary existing IP agreement gives us royalty revenue on any flavor of NAND flash revenue of the licensee. And so we will get paid royalties on their NAND flash revenue, whether that is 2D NAND flash or 3D NAND flash.
seekingalpha.com
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I'm less pessimistic than you, particularly in regard to ". . . the ROI for a major fab investment to make planar NAND . . ."
UWG was talking about building new fabs for planar NAND, not production of it. Production of it will continue for quite a few years. As Eli used to say, it will have a "long tail," and will be very profitable as depreciation costs go away.
But--no one will be building a new fab for planar 2D NAND. |
