Kingston Technology led worldwide channel SSD shipments in 2019, the latest market research has found, with the tech provider's SSD business continuing its strong rate of growth into 2020.
According to market share data from analyst firms Forward Insights and TrendFocus, Kingston Digital, the Flash memory affiliate of the company, ranked in first place for worldwide channel SSD shipments with 18.3% share of the market.
Semiconductor manufacturers Western Digital and Samsung achieved 16.5% and 15.1% respectively.
With 120 million SSDs shipped in the channel last year, Forward Insights said Kingston's impressive growth was driven by its range of SSD products and distribution setup.
"Demand in the channel remained very high as overall shipments increased 36% from 2018," said Gregory Wong, Forward Insights' president and principal analyst. "Kingston's competitive product portfolio and extensive distribution enabled it to outgrow the market by a factor of two."
TrendFocus placed Kingston as the third-largest supplier of SSDs globally behind Samsung and Western Digital, racking up a 10.4% market share. In 2019, the analyst firm revealed that 276 million SSDs were shipped around the world - marking an increase of 36% year-over-year.
NAND consumption also remained high as SSD shipments surged in terms of both units and average capacities over the twelve-month period.
"Favourable pricing for a good portion of 2019 helped drive demand in the client space, enabling increased SSD-attach rates from the OEMs," said Don Jeanette, TrendFocus vice president.
"Moving forward through the rest of 2020, SSD-attach rates in PCs will remain strong, with continued strong demand for SATA SSD in various data centre deployments, as well as continued increases with Hyperscale buildouts for PCIe."
Since 2019, Kingston said it has already further broadened its SSD portfolio with three new client SSDs, five data centre-specific drives – two of which achieved VMWare Ready status – as well as launched its first U.2 NVMe PCIe solution. SSD demand has also remained high during Q1, it said, thanks to continued growth in the client, enterprise and OEM sectors.
"We continue to solidify our presence in the client space with strong SATA offerings as well as distinct NVMe solutions optimized for notebooks and desktops," said Tony Hollingsbee, SSD business manager at Kingston EMEA.
"In addition to the growth in OEM and partner manufacturing, we are proud to deliver several new enterprise solutions with predictable performance and greater dependability for a variety of applications and host environments.”
