TapTechNews reported on May 16 that Kioxia recently announced its financial performance for the 2023 fiscal year ending on March 31. Kioxia achieved sales of 1.0766 trillion yen (approximately 500.62 billion yuan) in the 2023 fiscal year, a year-on-year decrease of 16%.
In the 2023 fiscal year, Kioxia's net loss was 243.7 billion yen (approximately 113.32 billion yuan), an increase of 105.6% compared to the 2022 fiscal year, with a net loss ratio of 23%, marking two consecutive years of losses.
Kioxia stated that the deterioration of its operating performance in 2023 was mainly due to a significant drop in average selling prices of its products in the first half of the fiscal year (April to September 2023).
However, in the second half of the fiscal year, with adjustments to production plans by major flash memory manufacturers, the overall supply and demand in the flash memory industry tended to balance out, partially offsetting the adverse market conditions in the first half of the fiscal year.
This situation is also reflected in the financial data for the fourth quarter of the 2023 fiscal year (January to March 2024):
In the last quarter, Kioxia achieved sales of 322.1 billion yen (approximately 149.78 billion yuan) and successfully realized a net profit of 10.3 billion yen (approximately 4.79 billion yuan), reversing the trend of consecutive losses.
During the quarter, the shipment volume of flash bit shipments experienced a high single-digit percentage growth and the average selling price based on the US dollar also increased by 20%.
Looking ahead:
Kioxia believes that as demand grows and NAND flash memory manufacturers continue to control production scale, the selling prices of its products will continue to rise;
With inventory normalization, the demand for PCs and smartphones is recovering, in addition to the acceleration of device updates due to factors such as the implementation of edge AI and operating system updates;
In the enterprise market, the increasing demand for AI applications for high-density large-capacity solid-state drives will drive the data center and enterprise-level solid-state drive markets to show signs of recovery in the second half of the year;
Overall, in the trend of the AI wave and the increase in single solid-state drive storage capacity, the flash memory industry remains optimistic about long-term growth prospects;
Kioxia will continue to optimize production and operating expenses according to market trends.