PriceSCAN Blog

The last week of December witnessed PriceSCAN.com listed vendors raising the price of key SanDisk flash products appreciably, while Kingston prices were either raised far less or, in some cases, sharply lowered. For example, merchants raised the price of SanDisk's 1 GB CompactFlash Card by an average of 6.5%, versus an average decline of 7% in the offered price of the similar Kingston 1 GB CompactFlash 33x Card. Similarly, the mean price of the SanDisk 1 GB Cruzer U3 USB Flash Drive shot up by an eye-popping 31% while the average price of Kingston's 1 GB Data Traveler USB 2.0 Flash Drive rose by only .02%. A similar pattern can be seen across much of the flash product lines of these firms.
What this means for SanDisk, Kingston, and the flash memory market is unclear. In a rational market, a persistent, sustainable price difference would argue for an actual difference in quality. If Kingston's devices are truly the functional equivalents of SanDisk's, one would expect the pricing of these two lines to converge. In an environment of strong demand, that could mean the rise in SanDisk pricing serving as a signal to Kingston and others, resulting in a general price hike. Of course, absent that firm demand, the new SanDisk pricing might not hold.