In recent years, China's domestic memory industry has seen rapid growth, with CXMT making steady breakthroughs in the DRAM sector and YMTC continuously expanding its territory in the flash memory field., and the entire Chinese memory industry is entering a golden period of comprehensive rise.
The latest quarterly report from market research firm Counterpoint Research shows that in Q2 2026, YMTC officially surpassed the established memory manufacturer Kioxia by a narrow margin in total NAND flash shipment capacity, marking its first entry into the ranks of the world's third-largest NAND flash supplier.
This quarter, YMTC's global market share reached 14%, with shipment capacity up 22% year-over-year and maintaining a 5% quarter-over-quarter growth, far outpacing its overseas counterparts during the same period.
Ahead of YMTC are Samsung Electronics with a 25% market share and SK Hynix with 22%. The latter's share consists of its own 13% plus 9% contributed by the acquired Solidigm. Micron, originally in the third tier with a 13% share, and SanDisk with 11%, have now fallen behind YMTC.
However, the report also highlights differentiation driven by product structure. Currently, more of YMTC's production capacity is allocated to the client SSD (cSSD) segment, which has lower average selling prices, rather than the higher-priced enterprise SSD (eSSD) sector. Therefore, in market share rankings based on revenue, YMTC falls behind Kioxia and Micron.
Data simultaneously released by the agency shows that in the past second quarter, 48% of global NAND flash shipment capacity went to the enterprise eSSD market, compared to only 26% in the same period last year. It is expected that by the end of 2026, the proportion of enterprise flash consumption will exceed the 50% mark.
The ongoing tight supply of flash memory across the industry has also driven up prices for client SSDs and embedded flash products like UFS. The overall revenue of the NAND storage industry grew fivefold compared to the same period last year, allowing domestic memory manufacturers to leverage this industry tailwind to continuously narrow the technology and scale gap with leading overseas enterprises.