SanDisk Corporation, a US-based multinational maker of flash technology memory chips that powers devices such as USBs, phones, tablets and cameras, is reckoning 2013 to be a record year, in terms of profits and revenues.

Co-founder Sanjay Mehrotra, who is also SanDisk’s President and CEO, spoke to Business Line on the company’s business opportunities and how it has managed supply chain efficiencies at a time when consumer demand and the global economic climate are getting volatile. Excerpts:

What has driven the adoption of flash memory?

Flash memory technology, over the past 25 years, has evolved through 18 generations. It has scaled up from a 4 MB chip to 128 GB chip — a 30,000 times increase in storage capacity. That, coupled with 50,000 times reduction in cost of flash tech, has made it ubiquitous. This has resulted in large-scale adoption.

Is that the reason you are bullish?

It is interesting to see how many mega markets have been created by flash memory and SanDisk over 25 years, working with other ecosystem partners that invented or co-invented solutions. USB flash drives rendered floppy disks obsolete.

Now it is used in mobile phones and ultra thin notebooks, enabling consumers to store photos and documents. Analysts are projecting that our revenues will top $6 billion and 2013 will be a record year — both on the revenue and profits side.

Now our strategy is to diversify the footprint of our products. We sell through a quarter of billion retail outlets all over the world, with a 38 per cent market share, and are the leaders.

This ability to drive retail branded channels and understand requirements amongst original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and enterprise customers are our advantages. This also comes from the vertical integration we have done within our organisation.

How did you do that?

In a couple of ways. We follow a vertical integration strategy. By vertical integration we mean that we do not stop after making chipsets required in flash technology. We invest at the R&D (of flash memory) level at the physics, design and process technology levels.

These controllers that go into chips make them intelligent enough to provide maximum performance in flash technology that goes into devices like laptops, desktops and has now permeated into enterprise storage solutions and data centres.

Then we ensure that distributors take these solutions to the market and constantly monitor the relevancy of flash technologies in different applications.

This is the key part of our strategy and will continue to be the foundation of the company in the future.

We make sure that we have a broad portfolio of products that can meet high-end as well as mid-range and low-end phones on the technology foundation that we have built.

We have 2,500 engineers worldwide and half of our workforce focuses on R&D. Another element is our ability to supply the volumes.

Our capacity is around 2 million units per day due to our investment in fabs (the company has a joint venture for this with Toshiba), which enhances our capacity to produce 2.5 million 12-inch wafers of leading edge flash memory technologies in a year.

In which areas do you see future opportunities?

In the areas of connected homes and wearable devices (like phones or glasses).

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