Legit Event Reviews
Interview with David Sun From Kingston Technology
| Manufacturer: | Kingston |
| Product: | Kingston HyperX |
| Date: | Wed, Jun 23, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Brian Wallace - |
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Interview with David Sun: Insight into Kingston Technology
David Sun, the co-founder and Chairman of Kingston Technology was gracious enough to meet with us in Taiwan during the busy week of Computex. Of all the cool things that we saw and did this week, this was the highlight of my week. It's not every day you get to meet one of the men behind a $4 billion dollar per year company and get his opinion on the economy and state of the memory industry.
To start off, I asked David if he see’s the DRAM market shrinking with less demand from desktop PC’s. He said that he expects to see desktop PC use to continue on it’s current level or to grow. With users of mobile devices needing someplace to store all of their data, this will most likely be a desktop PC. He told us that he sees laptop and netbook markets shrinking and tablet like devices growing, while smartphones will continue to explode.
Demand for DRAM will also be helped by mobile devices, with phones like the EVO 4G shipping with 512MB it’s easy to see that with more and more people relying on their smartphones for internet use, memory use will increase as well. I’m wondering how long it will be until we start buying DRAM to upgrade our cell phones?
With current prices nearly double of what they were just a year ago, Kingston still sees solid sales numbers. We were a little surprised to hear this, but he explained that it is because OEM’s buy less memory for systems that they ship, so end users buy more for their upgrades!
We asked David if there were any plans to expand the company and he told us that he is happy with the size of the company currently but may increase product lines. At just over 4000 employees worldwide, “it’s a happy company, I see my people smiling and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to worry about people jumping off the building.”
He talked to us about the economy and the impact it has had on the DRAM industry. While obviously slowing it, the industry is resilient because there is still strong demand from mobile devices like the iPod, iPad, and Android phones. The biggest growth they are seeing this year is in server memory, through the first 5 months of the year they have already equaled the total volume of 2009. With continued growth in Virtualization and advancements in multi-CPU technology from AMD and Intel, it’s no big surprise to see memory shipments increase for servers.
Finally, we have a couple of videos of David telling us about how Kingston was started and also about when the company was sold and bought back. It’s very interesting to hear about how one of the biggest companies in the tech industry started from such humble beginnings.
The video about how Kingston was started picks up at about 1:15.
I had to start a new video as the size was getting large, here he continues into the the sale and eventual buy back of the company from Softbank.
I hope you enjoyed reading about this and watched the videos. It’s not every day that you get to meet someone like David Sun and listen to some great stories.
Questions or Comments? View this thread in our forums!
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