Perhaps, solid-state drives from SanDisk rarely make it to headlines as the company is not seeking for maximum recognition for extreme-performance solid-state drives. Nonetheless, it does not mean that SSDs are not important for the company or their shipments stagnate. Apparently, sales of SanDisk-branded solid-state drives grew three times year-over-year in 2012 and totaled around $545.5 million.

“Total SSD sales were 10% of our fourth quarter revenue. On a year-over-year basis, our full-year SSD sales almost tripled and represented 9% of our 2012 revenue. We expect to grow our SSD revenue sequentially in Q1 2013 both in dollar terms and as a percentage of our overall revenue and we remain on track to drive 25% of our company revenue from SSDs in 2014,” said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive officer of SanDisk, during a conference call with financial analysts on Wednesday.

So far SanDisk has been mostly focusing its SSD business around leading OEMs. For example, SanDisk supplies solid-state drives to ten leading PC OEMs as well as four leading storage OEMs. To drive further growth of SSD business, SanDisk recently launched a new initiative to offer a broad range of OEM-grade client and enterprise solutions to value-added resellers, system integrators and direct market resellers.

“In the fourth quarter, we began revenue shipments of our SAS SSDs to a fourth storage OEM, and we are working closely with other OEMs to drive adoption of our enterprise SSDs. Of particular note, we have begun shipping what we believe to be the industry's highest capacity 1.6TB SAS drives,” said Mr. Mehrotra.

Tags: SanDisk, SSD, NAND, Flash, Business