Even this is old article , but it shows how much profit those companies made from removable flash memory products.

Mobile Growth To Drive Exploding Flash Memory Market

Nam Hyung Kim from market research company iSuppli wrote a piece in EETimes advising that, despite the soaring prices for the NAND flash suppliers, these market caps are justified. Kim projects continued growth for these companies:

Profitability: Look at the Q4 reports for Samsung Electronics, Toshiba, and Hynix to see spectacular profit margins. According to Kim, these players alone generated more than $6 billion in operating profits in 2005. Sandisk's operating margin exceeded 25% in Q4.

Revenues: "Worldwide NAND flash sales revenue soared to $3.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, up 18.8 percent from $2.96 billion in the third quarter, according to iSuppli’s preliminary estimate. For the whole of 2005, revenue for all NAND-type flash, including parts sold in Multichip Packages (MCPs), rose to $10.8 billion, up nearly 63 percent from $6.6 billion in 2004.

Growth in unit shipments for NAND-type flash exceeded that of DRAM in the third quarter. Furthermore, NAND is expected to supplant NOR-type flash as the most widely used embedded memory in mobile phones this year."

Valuations: Stock prices for NAND suppliers soared in 2005, with SanDisk and Hynix up about 170% over the year.

Market Growth: "The biggest potential market for removable flash-memory cards — mobile phones — recently has begun to adopt NAND as an external storage solution. iSuppli predicts mobile phones will exceed digital still cameras as the major market for removable flash cards for the first time in 2006.

This will spur another wave of growth in the NAND flash market, with worldwide revenue expected to rise to $16.8 billion in 2006, up 56 percent from 2005. By 2009, NAND flash revenue will increase to $26.2 billion, rising at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 32 percent from 2004.

While the NAND Average Selling Price (ASP) is expected to decline by nearly 50 percent this year, fast growth in unit shipments will more than offset the price erosion. Because of this, the present high valuations for Hynix and SanDisk do not appear to be in jeopardy of declining."