Since January we’ve gotten a few more pieces to the Apple SanDisk puzzle.

Nothing definitive, but enough to warrant another post before moving on.

SanDisk Analyst Day added some info. The Kinnucan capers even more so.

2012 Analyst Day

At this year’s Analyst Day in February, SanDisk’s OEM VP Dan Inbar used the slide below, “How is SanDisk Winning?”

“Memory” flanked by an iPad on the left and an iPhone on the right with “Winning” above.

I suppose these Apple products could simply be generic graphic representations of product categories, but a far more likely explanation is that this slide is a broad hint that SanDisk is, or soon will be, selling memory into both devices.

As mentioned previously, the only teardown of an Apple product that has revealed a SanDisk chip, that I am aware of, was an iPod Nano.

My guess is that the SanDisk chips have been missed along the way by the teardown shops. SanDisk NAND and Toshiba NAND are interchangeable and Toshiba NAND has been uncovered in many Apple teardowns including last week’s iPad 3 4G teardown by ifixit.

Ipad 3 logic board partial image below: the yellow rectangle: 16 GB 24 nm MLC Flash from Toshiba.

Dan’s presentation from Analyst Day, where he used the iPad-Memory-iPhone slide above:

“And this [winning] is being done with a lot of work and a lot of effort, which again, I’d try and share with you a bit, how this is happening. So obviously, the basic ingredient for all of SanDisk product is our memory. We need good memory, strong memory, advanced technology, scaled, et cetera.

And to date, our raw memory is being used in many components today, as a raw component. This, from our point of view, is a certificate of the strength of our raw technology, our basic NAND memory.”

So, Sandisk could be selling some of it’s basic NAND memory into some iPhones and iPads. Not a particularly big deal, nor should it be.

Judging by SanDisk’s weak Q1’s results, any sales in this period to Apple were not substantial.

This was directly addressed in the Analyst Day Q&A:

“Doug Freedman, RBC Capital Markets: All right. Let me try one more then on the OEM front. One of the complaints, I think, investors have had is that there’s a question whether you’re exposed to the right end customers.

We’re looking at Apple and Samsung doing extremely well in the smartphone market. Your exposure there is clearly limited. The question really is what are you doing to broaden your customer base, broaden the platforms? You mentioned that you felt like you got caught in the Q1 being limitedly exposed even at the customers that you have, you’re working on expanding that. How do I think about going forward what that has done to your strategy?

Dan Inbar: Yeah?

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