SanDisk popularizing Flash Technology

Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development, SanDisk India, shares with VARINDIA how flash is soon becoming a rage among industry OEMs and what has been SanDisk’s contribution to it

When it comes to the Indian market, there are two segments for SanDisk to focus on. The first one is the Indian smartphone market that is doing well at the moment. The only thing that can differentiate these handsets could be the memory. “The five top handset brands in India happen to be Indian brands today. Though hitherto they used to import raw materials from China to assemble their products here, they are slowly gearing up to make phones in India under the ‘Make-in-India’ initiative. Most of the mobile manufacturers will probably have their manufacturing units ready here in India by 2016. SanDisk is the leading supplier of embedded flash memory chips to smartphone OEMs. That is one of the areas we are looking at in India,” shares Vivek Tyagi, Director – Business Development, SanDisk India.

SanDisk has two departments for sales and marketing worldwide. One is retail sales that deals purely with consumer products, sold through the retail stores. It is a huge market and forms 35– 40% of SanDisk’s business worldwide. In 2011, it decided to venture into OEM and enterprise business. The OEMs span across product ranges from storage to servers to smartphones.

Secondly, with IDC, Gartner reports pointing to a good growth in the enterprise data storage, SanDisk is also eyeing this market with great interest.

SanDisk also has its R&D unit that was started five years ago.

Flash coming of age

It has been 26 years since SanDisk was formed. When SanDisk invented the flash memory for the first time, it was not too sure how to sell it to customers. The first Flash customer that SanDisk got was Kodak camera. Kodak was looking for a solution to store pictures and was keen on the idea of a memory storage concept which can store pictures even without power supply. They wanted it in a card format to use in their cameras. “This is how the first SanDisk product was a camera card for Kodak. Moving on, SanDisk came up with storage cards for other camera companies and when mobile got introduced we came up with cards for mobiles as well,” says Vivek...Read more