SanDisk’s founder, President and CEO Dr. Eli Harari, is gung-ho about what lies ahead for the flash memory market. He’s walking around the Consumer Electronic Show at Las Vegas oozing pride. He is quick in showing SanDisk’s mini SD card preloaded with the Rolling Stones album: ‘A Bigger Bang.’ “You can play it on 120 different cell phones in the world” he exclaims.

The Sunnyvale, CA based maker of flash storage cards and products recently introduced a new 6-gigabyte MP3 player: Sansa e270. The new player is expected to cost about $300 and take on Apple’s 4-gigabyte Nano, which is also flash-based and costs $249.

SanDisk entered the MP3 Player space a little over a year. Today it has about 29 percent of the MP3 flash category market, while Apple has about 49 percent, according to NPD Group, an industry research firm. Sanjay Mehrotra, co-founder, COO and EVP of SanDisk firmly believes that the new models will help the company increase market share. “Ultimately, we would like to make this a two horse race, and reach 35-40 percent market share,” says Nelson Chan, EVP Of Consumer Products Business and Corporate Marketing at SanDisk.

Along with MP3 audio player, at the CES, SanDisk also announced a slate of new gadgets including new USB drives. Following this, SanDisk’s (NASDAQ: SNDK) shares, which have traded between $20.25 and $69.39 over the last year, hit a new 52-week high of $74.40. Many analysts either maintained SanDisk’s stock as “Overweight” or an “Outperfomer.” SanDisk was the No.1 performing stock in 2005, with a return of over 250 percent. What’s even more interesting is that SanDisk has ascended to the Number 1 position on the si20 Tech Index, which is a listing of top 20 technology companies founded and managed by Indians in the U.S—it is based on the market capitalization of the company.

SanDisk is the worldwide leader in removable memory cards making it one of the biggest beneficiaries of the soaring demand for cell phones, digital music players, digital cameras, and game consoles. Revenues have surged an average of 70 percent over the past three years and are on track to rise 19 percent this year, to $2.1 billion.