Headquartered in Milipitas, SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK) delivers flash memory storage solutions worldwide. Founded in 1988, the company has a market cap of $14.20 billion.

The times, they are a-changing: mobile phones have officially overtaken computers in five leading global markets. Consumers have more mobile Internet-capable devices than desktop or laptop computers. Consumer habits are quickly shifting as more people begin to use their smartphone and tablet as their first, or only, form of Internet interaction. Smartphone usage is increasing at an exponential pace. What enables them is flash memory which is highly reliable and consumes less power. The reason SanDisk was founded originally was so that someday portable, low power, high reliability storage would be needed to enable devices like digital cameras and smartphones. SanDisk recently started focusing on the OEM side where flash gets embedded in the smartphones, laptops and other such similar devices.

The other area where there is a revolution is that of the Datacenter sector. The web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and other similar organizations have massive amount of data for processing from their apps and products. So they are trying to figure out ways to manage all that data at low cost. This is where flash makes its way through the data center in the enterprise to lower cost of ownership. Due to this reason, they can process the data more easily and swiftly than with a hard drive. This also helps reduce power consumption.

Staying Ahead is the Challenge

Our biggest challenge is to keep SanDisk at the top of the league. But for a 25 year old company such as SanDisk to be a frontrunner in the market throughout all these years require keeping pace with the changes in technology. Although in the lead, continuing to stay in the front is the greatest challenge; it is always important for a technology company but more important for a semiconductor company. This in turn leads to the challenge of pondering over the implementation of new technology and creating higher yield, higher performance out the existing technology.