Kingston Technology Co., the Fountain Valley-based maker of memory products for computers and consumer electronics, reported a small rise in 2009 sales after a year of rebounding prices for memory chips and improving demand.
The company on Monday reported 2009 sales of $4.1 billion, roughly flat from $4 billion in sales for 2008.
Privately held Kingston has around 800 workers here. It doesn’t disclose profits.
The company said the small revenue gain was due to better prices for memory chips and stronger demand for computer products from corporations and consumers.
Kingston buys memory chips and assembles them into modules and cards for computers and consumer electronics.
“The memory market saw some financial recovery last year like many other industries and Kingston was able to benefit from the general rise in (memory chip) pricing,” cofounder and President John Tu said.
Tu also attributed some of the gain to Kingston’s entrance into the market for solid state drives, which use flash memory chips and have no moving parts.
During the third quarter, average prices for dynamic random access memory, the most common type of memory chip, jumped 21% from the second quarter, according to data from El Segundo-based market tracker iSuppli Corp.
The market “is emerging from what has been a long and painful slump,” said Mike Howard, a senior analyst at iSuppli.
A year ago, Kingston got squeezed as the market saw a steep drop in prices for memory chips.
Chips from Asian and European suppliers are the building blocks for memory modules—circuit boards loaded with memory chips that speed the performance of computers and consumer electronics.
Falling prices crimp profits and lower the value of the inventory of chips bought earlier.
“A year ago at this time, we were bracing for a bad year,” cofounder and operations chief David Sun said. “Our company was lucky to catch some good breaks along the way that worked in our favor. We are very happy to be where we are.”
2009 marked Kingston’s second-highest yearly sales record. In 2007 it saw $4.5 billion in sales.
Kingston managed to grab market share during the downturn, according to some estimates.
During the first half of 2009, Kingston claimed about 38% of the market for memory modules.
That was up from 28% a year earlier, according to In-Stat, a market research unit of Reed Elsevier Group PLC.
The company’s closest competitor, Taiwan’s A-Data Technology Co., had 8% of the market.
Northern California’s Smart Modular Technologies Inc. came in third at 7.7%.
