According to the latest report from DRAMeXchange, SK Hynix surpassed Intel in the global NAND flash memory market in the first quarter of 2020 and returned to the top five in the global ranking.

The report shows that SK Hynix’s NAND flash sales in the first quarter of this year were $1.447, and its market share increased by 1.1% over the previous quarter, accounting for 10.7% of the global market, ranking fifth, while Intel's market share rose from 9.7% to 9.9%, ranking fell to sixth.

The industry believes that the increase in SK Hynix's market share is due to the surge in server SSD sales. Previously, SK Hynix said in the first quarter financial report that the company's NAND flash memory shipments increased by 7% in the first quarter, the proportion of NAND flash memory sales in total sales also increased, and server SSD sales reached 40% of NAND flash sales.

However, industry insiders also pointed out that SK Hynix's NAND flash memory business has been losing money for six consecutive quarters. In addition, if COVID-19 causes its customers to postpone the server expansion plan, demand may decline.

For the reason that SK Hynix did not profit from NAND flash memory, the industry believes that the company's competitiveness in the technology of the controller is weak, so it cannot increase the commercial value of high-value-added products, such as SSD, eMMCs and UFS. In addition, experts emphasized that in order to solve the above problems, SK Hynix needs to increase investment to upgrade its technology.