Chinese YMTC has been on a significant upswing, as confirmed by the global NAND Flash shipment market share tracker for the second quarter of this year. According to Counterpoint Research data, YMTC became the third-largest player in Q2, surpassing some of the biggest names in the industry. Leading the global NAND Flash shipment market share is Samsung, holding 25% of the market. In second place is SK hynix, along with its subsidiary Solidigm, commanding 22% of the market share.

However, YMTC has claimed the third spot, with its bit shipments growing 22% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter, edging ahead of Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk. YMTC's rise is attributed to substantial volume both domestically and internationally. Its Xtacking 4.0 storage architecture is now in mass production with 267-layer 3D NAND, and the path to 300+ layer technology is anticipated next year.

Despite ranking third in market share, YMTC only ranked fifth in revenue share among vendors. This is because YMTC focuses on consumer electronics, while competitors concentrate on the more profitable enterprise server and AI sectors. We recently reviewed an M.2 NVMe SSD based on YMTC's 3D TLC NAND (X4-9070) with 267-layer Xtacking 4.0 architecture and found its performance decent.