SanDisk’s Ascendance In Digital Music

In less than a year, memory card maker SanDisk went from zero to 10 percent of the digital music player market with the intro of the Sansa; it’s number 2 behind Apple’s 78-percent share. Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk, talked to Jeff Graham about the company’s move into the space and its plans.

– The new Sansa e200 comes out this month with flash memory, FM radio, voice recording — and the real differences from iPod’s flash-memory Nano — an extra memory slot and removable battery.

– “We saw an opening when the price of memory went down to the point where large capacities were truly affordable. We had a significant advantage over competitors, because we could get flash memory at lower costs than (Apple CEO) Steve Jobs could. We felt if we could leverage our 150,000 retail locations that sell our memory cards to sell our MP3 players, too, we could really have something. And we were proven correct.”

– “Apple hasn’t had a competing alternative that’s just as good. But that’s going to change. We are not going to be a 10% player. We will improve our position.”

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