Eli Harari, founder, chairman and CEO of SanDisk, will retire from his current positions on December 31, 2010. Sanjay Mehrotra, currently SanDisk's president and COO, will succeed Harari.

Toshiba has started construction of Fab 5 at Yokkaichi Operations, its memory production facility in Mie Prefecture, according to the company. The chip vendor also announced it has signed primary agreements with SanDisk for a new joint venture to operate the new facility.

The maker of high-speed memory chips changed its focus during a downturn, from retail to direct sales to device makers and sellers, and the company's shares have soared.

The drive is available in 8GB and 16GB capacities, carrying suggested retail prices of US$34.99 and US$69.99, respectively.

SanDisk's SSD P4 and SSD G4 offer up to 128GB and 256GB of storage, respectively, double the capacities of the company's previous SSD offerings.

SanDisk swung to net profits of US$235 million for the quarter ended April 4 from losses of US$208 million a year ago. "We delivered SanDisk's first ever billion dollar Q1 in total revenue. This performance was driven by several factors including our OEM business which grew to 63% of product revenues balancing out Q1 retail seasonality..."

Pacific Crest Securities has downgraded SanDisk to underperform, saying the maker of memory chips may be headed for a period of flat market dynamics.

In the NAND flash rankings for 2009, there is a surprise vendor on the list. According to Web-Feet Research, Samsung Electronics remained the leader in NAND flash in terms of share, followed in order by Toshiba and then SanDisk. SanDisk was ahead of Micron, Hynix and Intel.

SanDisk now expects first-quarter revenues will reach between NT$925 million and NT$1 billion, compared to the originally estimated NT$875-925 million. (and vs. consensus estimates of $942.4 million).

The drives have arrived more than a year after SanDisk announced them, and more than six months after they were originally supposed to ship. A spokeswoman said the delay was due to a desire to "optimize" the product.

Toshiba will spend 800 billion yen (US$8.9 billion) to build a new microchip plant, reviving plans that it had put on hold amid sluggish sales, according to the Nikkei business daily. It may start construction of the new factory for NAND flash memory chips as early as this summer, aiming to begin operations in spring 2011.

SanDisk beat analysts' estimates as sales for memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras, USB flash drives and other electronics climbed 22% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter.

SanDisk has admitted that far not all solid-state drives (SSDs) that are on the market right now are really reliable, which is why many of them are never used inside branded personal computers.

"We are encouraged by improved industry fundamentals and our increasingly diversified global markets, which bode well for further growth in Q4 and in 2010," said Eli Harari, SanDisk chairman and CEO.

SanDisk is incorporating the X4 chips into existing storage cards, without any identifying labeling or change in pricing. The fact that it is not immediately passing cost savings on to consumers is a sign of easing conditions in the volatile market.

The SSD market has been one of several factors that have boosted demand for NAND flash memory and, as a result, boosted NAND flash prices, too. While this trend will likely continue to benefit Micron and SanDisk, it is equally likely to work against STEC in the longer term.

Shares of memory chip developer Rambus rose 8% on September 4 on speculation that Samsung Electronics would buy the company, but Samsung said it had no such plans.

South Korea's Samsung Electronics said in a disclosure that it is no longer pursuing a plan to purchase SanDisk.

Eli Harari, founder, chairman and chief executive of SanDisk, made the predications during a keynote. He also warned that the NAND industry is at the "crossroads," as there is a "disconnect" between future capacity requirements and demand.

"We are very pleased with our return to profitability in the second quarter, driven by increased pricing, higher royalty revenues and strong execution," said company CEO Eli Harari. "We remain cautiously optimistic about the second half of 2009."

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Daniel Amir said he believes SanDisk gained market share of about 3% at the expense of rivals in the MicroSD memory card market during the second quarter.

According to the complaint, LSI initially contacted SanDisk in 2007 to initiate patent license negotiations for several of SanDisk's digital media players. LSI eventually alleged that SanDisk's media players violate a total of eight patents held by LSI, according to the complaint.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari once plotted to dethrone the iPod with a series of "iDon't" ads--a marketing campaign that cast Apple iPod users as fad-driven sheep, and promoted his company's Sansa media players as the smart alternative.

SanDisk and Samsung Electronics on May 27 announced they have reached an agreement to renew the cross license of their semiconductor patent portfolios. The companies have also signed a flash memory supply agreement under which Samsung will continue to make available to SanDisk a guaranteed portion of its flash memory production output.

SanDisk CEO Eli Harari said 2009 could turn out to be "significantly better" than anticipated at the start of the year as big cutbacks in flash memory production bring balance back to an industry stung by oversupply.

SanDisk chief Eli Harari delivered some odd news for folks tracking the memory market: Flash memory prices and demand are actually rising.

The Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) workgroup was created in May of 2006 to standardize the low-level interface to NAND flash chips from different manufacturers. However, the two largest NAND flash manufacturers are not members of ONFI. Samsung and Toshiba together account for approximately 70% of global NAND flash production, although their market share has been dropping by around 10% annually since ONFI was first standardized. SanDisk is also notably absent from the list of members.

SanDisk has announced that it will begin mass-production of 4-bits-per-cell (X4) flash memory. Using 43nm process technology, this breakthrough enables 64Gb memory in a single die. The X4 memory chip combines with the X4 controller chip in a multi-chip package (MCP) to provide a complete, integrated and low-cost storage solution.

SanDisk is disclosing at a San Francisco technology conference Tuesday that it will begin mass production of memory chips that will allow consumers to store up to 64GB of data on tiny flash cards. The company's X4 technology will pack four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell.

SanDisk said Monday that hefty charges to write down the value of assets and inventory amid industrywide price reductions forced the world's largest supplier of flash memory cards to post a larger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss.

SanDisk said that it had signed a definitive agreement with Toshiba to restructure the Flash manufacturing joint ventures operating at the 300mm Fab 3 and Fab 4. The result of the agreement will be basic SanDisk's transition to fabless flash-based products manufacturing.

SanDisk unveiled a portable digital music system based on memory cards preloaded with songs, signaling a shift in its strategy to compete against the iPod. The Sansa slotRadio player and companion line of slotRadio music cards were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

"The joint venture is evaluating plans for operations over the holiday season, including a possible stoppage of some production lines," a SanDisk spokesman said Friday. "We constantly consider manufacturing schedules in light of market requirements and this is particularly true during the holiday season," he added. This follows a Bloomberg report that said Toshiba is considering a "partial stoppage" of flash memory production in Japan over the holidays.

SanDisk has been hurt by falling prices for NAND memory chips, a type of flash memory the company makes for consumer gadgets like music players and digital cameras. But a Goldman Sachs analyst said key intellectual property rights associated with the chips give the SanDisk more value than the market has recognized.

SanDisk has released details of its new flash management technology, ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System) which has the potential to extend endurance and accelerate SSD random write speeds by as much as 100 times compared with existing systems.