Even a quick look at the market figures of the Flash segment of the semiconductor industry is enough to illustrate that this is in no way a mature market. There are no strictly assigned tiers for the leader of the pack, and from quarter to quarter, market shares are fought for, often with a dramatic effect on market leadership.

About a year ago, Intel had to yield the throne as leading Flash maker for the first time due to a strategic error, slipping to fourth place behind Samsung, Toshiba and Spansion (AMD/Fujitsu). The company had attempted to assert its position as market leader by forcing its customers into long-term supply agreements. Its regular customers reacted by defecting to the competition, however. Intel did manage to fatten itself on revenues in the second quarter of this year.

AMD-Spansion, which makes both NAND and NOR memory, caught up with Intel in the first half of the year, becoming the largest manufacturer of the lucrative NOR memory ($846 million, compared to $785 million). The company made almost $1.3 billion on Flash overall in the first six months, which represents more than half of the revenue of its parent company ($2.5 billion). Both Intel and AMD managed to increase their market shares during the past half-year, while Samsung and Toshiba lost ground.

According to a September estimate by iSuppli, the ranking of manufacturers of Flash memory looks like this:

iSuppli expects Flash revenues worldwide to reach about $16.6 billion for the current year, which represents an increase of a good 46% over 2003 ($11.64 billion). The driving forces of the enormous growth are, above all, the high memory requirements of digital cameras, and steeply rising unit counts of USB sticks and compact MP3 players. For 2005, earnings of $17.5 billion (an additional gain of 5%) are predicted.

Percentile growth will become less dramatic between 2005 and 2008: iSuppli sets annual sales volume up to that point at $22.4 billion, rounded up.