The NAND flash memory market will be worth $30.0 billion in 2013, an increase of 12 percent over its values of $26.8 billion in 2012, according to market research firm IC Insights.

Smartphones are forecast to account for 26 percent of the NAND flash memory market (see figure below). Smartphones will represent 56 percent of all mobile phone shipments in 2013 – 975 million of 1,745 total shipments – up from 750 million or 42 percent of all cellphone shipments in 2012.

Smartphones contain approximately 9 times as much flash memory as an ordinary mobile phone, IC Insights said.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are forecast to account for 13 percent of NAND flash memory sales in 2013 as the storage medium becomes a challenger to hard disk storage in notebook computers. SSDs are also starting to gain favor in server computers, which can benefit from faster read/write speeds and reduced power consumption.

Car navigation systems, industrial equipment, and digital video recorders are some of the other applications that are being targeted for SSDs.

Tablet computers typically feature 16-Gbyte of NAND flash as a starting point and the market has grown rapidly. The iPad almost doubled its shipments from 65 million in 2011 to 117 million in 2012, said IC Insights. Tablet computer shipments are forecast to reach 167 million units in 2013.