Samsung Electronics Co.'s global share in the NAND flash market declined to below 30 percent in more than two years, data showed Wednesday, as the tech giant is struggling to retain its top spot against rivals amid a profit slide. 

The South Korean tech behemoth posted US$2.45 billion for NAND flash revenue in the third quarter, up 8.2 percent from three months earlier, according to the data compiled by e-commerce site DRAMeXchange, which also does market research on memory chips. 

That is equivalent to a market share of 29.7 percent for Samsung Electronics in the July-September period, down 1.1 percentage points from 30.8 percent tallied the previous quarter, the data showed. 

A NAND flash memory chip is a non-volatile computer storage medium that saves data without power, a major difference from volatile DRAM chips. 

DRAMeXchange cited the upbeat performance of Japan's Toshiba Corp., Samsung's runner-up rival, whose corresponding revenue soared 23.7 percent over the cited period, putting its market share at 22.6 percent as of end-September. 

Toshiba saw a big increase in its NAND flash sales in the third quarter, buoyed by robust demand for mobile devices and solid state drives (SSD), which refer to a faster and more durable storage device than hard disks. 

Samsung has been striving to overcome its falling global market share in both the memory chip and mobile industries, the two flagship sectors for the world's No. 1 memory chip and smartphone maker. 

Samsung's third-quarter net profit almost halved to 4.22 trillion won (US$3.81 billion), with its operating profit tumbling 60 percent on-year to 4.1 trillion won in the same quarter.

At an IR session held in New York on Monday (U.S. time), Robert Yi, the head of Samsung Electronics' IR department, said the company plans to cut down its smartphone production by a quarter next year in a bid to regain price competitiveness against Chinese rivals, including fast-growing Xiaomi Inc. 

Besides Samsung, SK hynix Inc., the world's No. 2 South Korean memory chipmaker, saw its share come in at 10.3 percent in the NAND flash chip market, recouping to a double-digit percentage in a year.  

SK hynix's share had fallen to a single digit since it reached 11.4 percent in the third quarter, the report said. (Yonhap)