No More a Flash in the Pan

With increase in demand for digital data storage requirement coupled further with extensive mobility associated with modern day-to-day business life, demand for external and portable storage mediums has been growing heavily. Both flash drive and flash card markets have been growing phenomenally over a period of last few years. Although the market was affected slightly due to slowdown in 2009, yet business was good in 2010. What was more visible was the rising demand for high capacity pen drives. Today the entry level capacity for a flash drive is 4GB which constitutes 70% of the market. Demand for 8GB followed by 16 GB too has gained traction throughout this year.

The flash market is one of the biggest growing segments in India. However, due to its substantial dependence on parallel import apart from the business generated through the authorized distributors, it is very difficult to estimate the correct size of the market. Surprisingly, this model of parallel import has tacit sanction of the principals themselves. The market which is primarily fed by China and Taiwan runs purely on cash transactions and is a high volume business that is done through both IT and telecom channels as well as large format retails. However, with some revisions of the current duty structure in place, the coming year may witness a major decline in parallel import.

Further to the rise in mobile phone adoption across India, the market for flash memory cards has already been witnessing exponential growth. As use of multimedia applications like music, video, pictures, games supported by easily available multimedia handsets are increasing, the consumption of MMC cards are growing tremendously. And with multimedia handset prices dropping continuously added with the growing insurgence of the cheaper Chinese handsets in India the market for flash card has boosted further. The other visible trend has been the significant growth in microSD cards consumption. Previously these cards used to come with adapters, a trend that was altered by Sandisk once it withdrew bundling adapter within the package. This move played a vital role in decreasing Sandisk's popularity among the users. However, the others brands too gradually followed the same path and now it has become a visible norm. As the flash market started migrating to higher storage capacities, a lot of activities were witnessed from the principals as almost every one launched new products at regular intervals, especially targeting niche segment by launching products with better design and style. These products are also becoming hugely popular as corporate gifts and are replacing other media like CDs and DVDs for storing corporate or business presentations.