Phison joined the recent IT Press Tour in California and we realized that the company is ubiquitous, already present in plenty of market solutions but usually masked or hidden. Things have started to change and the firm has promoted a clear goal to be seen as a finished product vendors beyond client SSD.
In terms of company profile, we have to realize that Phison is a giant, already chosen by brands and vendors such as Kioxia, Micron, Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, YMTC, Intel or SK Hynix. Founded more than 23 years ago, its weight is also impressive generating $2B a year for 3800 employees. Another dimension is related to the NAND and controllers footprint. When I said giant, it is here translated in 600 millions controllers shipped annually coupled with more than 16EB of NAND. Just think about this: 1 out of 4 SSDs sold on the planet have Phison inside. To illustrate their leadership, I can list also some record like the first Gen4 SSD in 2020 or the fastest Gen5. 31% of the company revenue comes form controllers for Q3/FY21 and 70% is generated by ODM/OEM/Tier 1 partners. In other words, Phison is everywhere. This is huge.
But it turns out that this is no enough for the coming years as the management team desires to be seen as an enterprise player as well. For more than 2 decades, the firm owned NAND wafers, developed firmwares, designed controllers and ran manufacturing to deliver finished products. With this global comprehensive integration the team has already produced impressive products as the first PCIe Gen4 SSD in 2019. A perfect example of complete product development made and controlled by Phison is the Seagate Nytro which is a PCIe Gen4 Dual Port X1 SSD, one of the best in the industry. And it will continue and accelerates as we understand that new Gen4 models will appear end of 2023 and Gen5 beginning of 2024.
To sustain this strategy and penetrate faster the enterprise segment, Phison has launched Imagin+, an advanced design service dedicated to partners for joint SSD development. This program also is an answer to high demanding applications in AI, ML and HPC who require innovative products with top data transfers and low power consumption. Imagin+ helps partners to co-design and align their requirements with Phison expertise to develop and deliver unique products.
As mentioned above, the strong partnership between Seagate - Phison is illustrated by the PS5020-X1, one of the most advanced PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD drive on the market. And Seagate confirmed to have made the perfect choice with Phison for several reasons: the customization of course, the low power consumption, the architecture with balanced smaller processors design. The result is visible with the first world PCIe Gen5 SSD. We expect to see more and more partners adopting Phison Imagin+.
In terms of applications, Phison already is actively present at the edge with automotive, agriculture, wearable or home solutions thanks to AI. The last example is Phison shipping SSDs to the moon with the NASA program, a new proven demanding program promoted by Skycorp.
Beyond this PCIe Gen4 and Gen5, we learnt also that the team is working on CXL.
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