OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen stated during an earnings call with financial analysts that pricing of 20/25nm class MLC NAND flash memory has bottomoted, and that in order to further boost capacities and/or reduce SSD pricing, new types of NAND such as TLC and smaller process nodes will be needed. Xbitlabs:

Demand for OCZ's solid-state drives increased by 54% year-over-year during the quarter. In fact, the company shipped over 100 thousand of Indilinx Everest 2-based products, including Vertex 4 and Agility 4, in the first quarter of its fiscal 2013. With the evident success of its SSDs in hard disk drive form-factors, OCZ now claims that solid-state storage has already become strong competitor for traditional hard drives despite of lower capacities.

"It has always been our belief that SSD prices do not need to match those of hard disk drives on a per gigabyte basis in order to drive large scale adoption of SSDs. As such, it is becoming evident that SSDs are increasingly competing with hard disk drives in cost conscious market segment, a trend that is clearly positive for the SSD industry," stated Mr. Petersen.

OCZ believes that by now the pricing of multi-level cell (MLC or 2bpc) NAND flash memory produced using 25nm/20nm-class process technologies has bottomed. As a result, OCZ claims that in order to further boost capacities of SSDs and/or reduce their pricing, new types of NAND flash memory, such as 2bpc/MLC and/or 3bpc/TLC made using thinner technologies, will need to be used for solid-state storage devices.

"Given that, we believe that pricing on 25nm NAND flash has reached its bottom and in order to drive continued price decreases on a per gigabyte basis, SSD companies need to continue to introduce support for new NAND flash nodes and new technologies, such as the upcoming 20nm and 19nm nodes and TLC," stated Mr. Petersen.