iSuppli Corporation has published its market rankings for flash memory in the third quarter this year. The biggest winners are Samsung and Toshiba. The biggest losers are Intel and FASL LLC – a joint-venture between AMD and Fujitsu.

The world’s largest DRAM maker and now also the world’s Number One flash memory supplier Samsung Electronics gained 4.2% market share from the first quarter and this allowed the company to move from the second spot to the fist place with 20% market share.

Toshiba managed to boost its share by stunning 5.3% and became the world’s second largest flash memory maker in Q3 2003 with 17.3% of the market.

FASL LLC – a joint-venture between Advanced Micro Devices and Fujitsu – had 13.8% of the market in the third quarter. In the first quarter 2003 AMD had 10.5% share, Fujitsu owned 9.1% of the market. The aggregated market share of two companies could have been higher today, but looks like there were a number of difficulties underway with sales of FASL’s flash components.

However, Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corporation proved to be the biggest disappointment after loosing incredible 10% of the market within the second and the third quarters. In the first quarter this year Intel’s share was 23.5%, in the third quarter it fell to 13.5%.

Sharp also succeeded in tremendously expanding its flash market share this year. The company had 10.4% of the market, nearly 100% up from the Q1’s 5.5%.

Other manufacturers of flash memory components proved to be very successful in boosting their market presence at expense of the first-tier flash companies. In the Q1 their aggregated share was about 16.6%, in the Q3 they had nearly 25%.