18. December 2008 by David Peterson.

Sylvie Barak recently reported that both Sandisk and Toshiba are going to idle some of their memory plants.

What does this mean for you and I… there appears to be a memory glut at the moment which should result in lower prices on flash memory. This news is coming at a time that the factories should be in full production.

These memory chips are used in everything from computers to cameras, cell phones to cars, and yes - our beloved USB Memory Stick.

I can remember a few years ago when right around September my main supplier would boost prices, reporting expected shortages. Yesterday he sent a note in reply to the Sylvie Barak article that he expects demand destruction to adjust prices.

His main point is that many of the USB flash memory distributors in the US are overstocked with inventory. Flash memory is a commodity. If you have too much inventory at this time you will be selling it for a price lower than it currently costs. Thus - a lot of these companies may go under quickly.

We shall see. There are a lot of companies holding inventory right now. Our own USBFlashMemory.BIZ  web based business holds minor amounts of inventory to meet current demand. One way around the problem is to order ONLY what you need at the moment. That’s called “just-in-time” inventory and that is how we will be navagating the current price destruction.

We have learned from past experiences. If you blink the 1GB memory stick that you paid $200 wholesale will drop to $6 or lower just that fast. That is exactly why a memory business should keep limited inventory. That situation has repeated itself for every drive size, every year that we have been in business.

Just-in-time inventory is a good strategy for our business but some of the “decorators” (custom logo companies) must carry a variety of styles, colors, and sizes to meet their customer’s future expectations. Those companies will probably be dumping memory and completed USB flash drives very shortly.

The bottom line for the consumers of these flash memory drives - prices in the near term are going down! Long term - we shall see but if history is any indication, I would expect prices to drop long term as well.

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4. December 2008 by David Peterson.

Well I’m not surprised - I logged onto my vendors website to quote a prospect and a big smile came over my face. I noticed their were no 64MB or 128MB units being offered.

 I have been in the business of selling promotional flash memory since December of 2002. I can still remember when our best selling unit was 64MB. The price at that time was around $26/unit for 64MB!

 Here we are 6 years later and the smallest size I will be offering from this point forward is 256MB.

This has been an incredible ride with memory sizes more than doubling every year or so. We used to have trouble “cramming” enough chips into USB flash memory drive to make a 512MB unit.

Now - I just registered the domain name 1tbUsbMemory.com - as in 1 terra byte or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. You can’t buy them just yet but it will not be long. In the near future your computers hard drives will be all solid state with no moving parts. Flash memory is the way go.

 Here is an interesting point concerning the USB market… How much memory do you really need? If you are just transferring school work or office documents do you really need 4GB of space? The answer today is no, but in the future your drives will come with features preinstalled like rock solid security, automatic recovery disks, and no doubt - games.

When I first started the JDPDigital.com business my original tag line was… “Throw away your floppy disks!” I didn’t imagine back then that one day we might be “Throwing away your 1TB of memory!”

 For now just enjoy the ride. If you want a 128MB you can probably still find them but they will end up costing you more than a 1GB at this point. 

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