🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Kioxia’s profit boom comes from fewer pricing limits

• Kioxia’s stronger outlook partly comes from getting out of long-term contracts that had it selling NAND below market prices to a large customer, Daishin Securities said 1.
• A revised pricing plan for North American customers was set to start in the first quarter of 2026. Average selling prices (ASP) for large accounts were projected to climb about 50% from the prior quarter, Daishin Securities said 1.
• Morgan Stanley forecast Kioxia’s adjusted gross margin could reach 66% 1.
• The balance sheet has improved. Net debt-to-equity fell from 227% in the first quarter of fiscal 2024 to 80% in the third quarter of fiscal 2025, Kioxia said 2.

AI is lifting NAND demand and raising consumer SSD prices

• AI demand has changed the consumer market. A Kioxia executive said 1TB solid-state drives (SSDs) priced near 7,000 yen (US$45) are no longer the norm 3.
• Kioxia has already sold out its NAND supply for 2026. The company expects tight supply to last at least through 2027 3.
• NAND is also moving into new uses such as high-bandwidth flash (HBF), a flash memory approach that can offer about 10 times the capacity of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) at lower cost 4.
• Kioxia is working with NVIDIA on SSDs that connect directly to graphics processing units (GPUs). The aim is to ship drives by 2027 that are nearly 100 times faster than current models 4.