2016.07.01
In the past few years, data storage demand has been picking up momentum year by year, especially in mobile smart devices' storage application segments. According to sources, global storage chips amounted to nearly US$ 80 billion in value. For China alone, its Flash memory demand reached US$ 10 billion, and embedded storage occupied more than 80% of the market demand.
Naturally, China's largest storage firm, Shenzhen Longsys Electronics Co ., Ltd (aka Longsys) would never miss this enormous opportunity from the mobile smart devices' storage market. During the recent GSMA Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, Longsys proactively participated and showcased its latest embedded and mobile storage products and technologies.
Embedded storage demand remains heated
In the past few years, the global smart devices' end market has developed rapidly. Smartphones especially became necessary to humans' daily life and career during the post-PC era. Therefore, mobile smart devices' storage demand rose dramatically.
Even though the smartphone market's growth rate has slowed down significantly in recent years, its global shipments are still able to reach nearly 1.3 billion units each year. Apart from smartphones, tablets, portable notebooks and 2-in-1 notebooks also have sizable demand.
During this MWC 2016 expo, Longsys showcased several of its latest embedded storage products, including eMMC, eMCP, and UFS. Among them, the latest UFS storage products clearly showed that Longsys has pursued the latest storage technology and capabilities.
UFS Storage Products
During the MWC 2016 expo in Shanghai, DRAMeXchange, a storage research division of TrendForce, interviewed Longsys' vice president of sales Wuei Ming Wang. Wang stated, "Longsys' UFS storage products have faster transmission speeds than eMCP and eMMC. They are applicable not only to smartphones and tablets but also to popular VR devices and drones with 4K recording capabilities. The latter segments require much faster and larger storage capacities, and UFS exactly satisfies these demands."
Wang further revealed that Longsys' new models of UFS storage will reach a mass production phase and will start to be shipped out in the fourth quarter of this year. In the future, UFS will provide good values to the industry, just like mainstream eMMC/eMCP, Wang said.
Aside from launching popular embedded storage products, Longsys has also been shifting its attention to SSDs and embedded SSDs several years ago. These products have seen a massive increase in popularity in the last two years. Longsys has already registered the FORESEE brand in 2010, specifically to marketing to the industry's customers.
According to DRAMeXchange's data, in 2016, SSDs are expected to account for up to 34% of all NAND Flash demand. Eventually, they could begin to top all applications of NAND Flash. As of now, the 128GB SSD price has already become lower than 500 GB HDDs, so the attraction of Client-SSDs' price is more and more significant. This price drop will potentially allow SSD adoption in notebooks to surpass 40% in the fourth quarter this year.
In this year's MWC Shanghai expo, Longsys exhibited the M. 2 SSD, and external SSD. According to Wang, Longsys' market position has been doing what suppliers are not willing to do, and doing the segments that suppliers have not covered. This includes providing smaller-quantity customization options to customers. Likewise, in the SSD segment, Longsys aims to differentiate its functions from suppliers' functions and to collaborate with suppliers in order to serve all types of customer and market demand.
Longsys's extremely low power consumption SSD can serve as a smartphone storage
Aside from maintaining great collaboration with NAND Flash suppliers, Longsys is able to also co-operate strategically with global hard drive controller firm Marvell. Longsys currently uses Marvell's latest 28-nanometer controller chip. It researches and develops its SSD products' components, packaging, and hardware design by using Marvell's open-source controller codes.
Longsys' SSD has incomparable advantages of low power consumption and product quality because of its latest state of the art controller chip, high-quality Flash components, and accumulated experiences in firmware, design, packaging, and testing.
Moreover, Wang expressed, "Because consumers use more images, video and audio contents, a smart devices' own storage capacity will not be enough to satisfy users. In this regard, external SSDs might break new ground in the mobile storage market. Since SSDs have naturally surpassed USB Flash drives in terms of transmission speed and capacity advantage, the trend of shrinking sizes and the falling price will continue."
Wang believes that Longsys has always devoted itself to revolutionizing storage products in terms of new technical design, higher-quality, and higher performance/cost ratio, in order to serve consumers.
Established in 1999, this year is Longsys' 18th year. All these years' experiences have enabled Longsys to break through the barriers of the industry.
Wang revealed that after more than a dozen years of development, the firm has about 400 employees and half of them are researchers and developers. In addition, Longsys has consumed more than 200 million NAND Flash chips each year.
Such an achievement has been significant to the Chinese storage industry.
In the future, Longsys will keep focusing on storage products' applications. Based on Wang's introduction, Longsys' four major categories of products will be USB Flash drives, memory cards, SSDs, and eMMCs. In addition to these products, Longsys will also begin developing wireless storage products and IoT modules with its branch companies.
Whether it is USB Flash drives, SD cards, eMMC, eMCP, SSD, or wireless storage, Longsys has always increased the values of storage products. "Only when our product quality and yield rates are improved can we provide more value to consumers, customers, and partners," Wang said.
In order to make value-added services available to more customers, Longsys has established branch companies in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Thailand, and the US. In this way, professional customization storage products can reach more local customers worldwide. Recently, Longsys has also invested in an assembly and testing company in Brazil.
Value-added ideology in the firm's genes and clear product lines both signify that Longsys precisely controls its own market position and developing strategies. This might be one of the reasons why Longsys is a leader in China's storage industry.
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