The storage market faces three major challenges

• In the just passed year of 2024, the storage market staged a "song of ice and fire": the consumer electronics recovery in the terminal market was slow, while AI applications continued to make strong breakthroughs. Storage products have thus opened up a polarized development: consumer storage demand is flat, while the market for high-performance, enterprise level storage products is booming. The original storage factory adjusted its production capacity based on market conditions in the second half of 2023 in order to improve the supply-demand relationship. By 2024, the capacity adjustment gradually took effect, and multiple storage vendors returned to a profitable mode in 2024. However, the trend of contract prices in the memory market is not so smooth sailing. Overall, in the first half of 2024, the contract prices in the memory market continued to rise. However, in the second half of the year, due to changes in market demand, the contract prices in the memory market encountered downward pressure. In the fourth quarter, DRAM showed a convergence of its gains, while NAND Flash reversed its decline. Looking ahead to 2025, the industry believes that although AI applications are still very strong, driving the demand for high-performance HBM and QLC SSD products to skyrocket, there is still no strong recovery signal in the consumer electronics market, and the storage market may still face challenges in three aspects: terminal demand, price, and production capacity.