Fissal Oubida, General Manager – Middle East, Africa and India, Lexar, spoke to Veronica Martin about the firm’s key innovations, and how Lexar is strengthening its raft of solutions to optimise customer experience – at all times ensuring resilience and a portfolio of ‘safety first’ solutions.
Many companies are unveiling new solutions and products at GITEX 2025 – what is the key innovation or launch you’re most excited to showcase this year, and why is it relevant for the region?
Every year, Lexar introduces different types of innovation in two main areas. The first is upgrading existing products. For example, we have a memory card with a speed of 2,000 MB/s, and we continue to innovate to make it faster – in fact, up to 3,000 MB/s. We also have cards that currently reach 1TB, and we’re working to expand that to 2TB and even 3TB. That’s one type of innovation.
The second type is creating completely new products. This year, we launched the Armour SD card, a stainless-steel card made from metal; it’s waterproof, dustproof and step-proof!
We’ve also introduced a portable SSD that’s extremely compact, weighing only 13 grams, with capacities ranging from 1TB to 2TB – and even up to 4TB. It’s compatible with both Android and iPhone devices.
Every year we bring several new innovations and come to GITEX to showcase them; to let people experience them, test them, and share them with influencers for unboxing. That’s what we’re here for at GITEX.
With the UAE’s recent focus on national AI infrastructure projects, how is your company contributing to building or enabling this ecosystem?
Everyone talks about AI, but many forget one crucial fact: AI cannot function for even a single minute without storage. We are the environment; we are the home of AI.
Right now, AI is like a dragon pet living in the house. It’s powerful, but capable of causing chaos if not contained properly. At Lexar, we create a clean, safe, and efficient environment for this ‘dragon’ by developing extremely fast SSD memory.
We now have memory that reaches speeds of 14,000 MB per second. When installed in a laptop with a powerful AI setup, it allows data to be retrieved from storage in real time, instantly and efficiently.
Lexar is continuously innovating to make its memory products faster, more efficient, and with larger capacities, because AI demands both speed and space. We are now expanding our consumer storage capacity to 8TB, which is rare in the consumer market. While enterprise-level memory has already reached 8TB and 16TB, most consumer devices still offer only 1TB or 2TB. But Lexar is breaking that barrier, moving into 4TB and 8TB storage for consumers.
AI presents huge opportunities but also real challenges, from data quality and governance to scalability. How is your organisation addressing these challenges while maximising AI’s potential for your customers?
Well, this presents a big challenge for us. Why? Because AI is consuming almost all the memory stock worldwide, leaving regular consumers – who need standard memory – facing both supply shortages and higher prices.
Over the next two to three years, AI will continue to consume massive amounts of storage, and the market will likely face a major supply crisis. Prices could increase by 200 to 300%.
I believe that wafer and chip manufacturing companies will need to adapt to this new reality by expanding their production cycles. Unfortunately, for large manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, WD, and Micron, increasing production takes time – typically one to two years to set up and scale a single production unit.
However, at Lexar, we’re ensuring a continuous and consistent supply. We are committed to maintaining reasonable prices and providing our consumers with a reliable, steady supply of products despite market challenges.
The cybersecurity threat landscape continues to evolve in parallel with advances in AI and cloud adoption. How are you strengthening your solutions to ensure resilience and trust in this new digital era?
Well, our slogan is ‘Everything from Memory’. So, we tell our photographers: go out, take photos, climb a mountain to capture a tiger, and when you come back, you can be confident that your photos are still safe.
We are the No.1 memory imaging card brand in India. The wedding industry in India is massive – thousands of weddings happen every day – and we hold the largest market share. 67% of imaging photography cards in India belong to Lexar.
Why? Because photographers trust us. They trust the quality, they trust that their data is safe, and they trust that their photos are secure. And if data is ever lost on one of our cards, Lexar provides its own free data recovery software.
Unlike other brands, where you are redirected to a third-party service and have to pay to recover your data, ours is free and fully developed in-house. We take the safety, security, and reliability of your data very seriously.
Are you announcing any new partnerships or collaborations during the event, and how do these align with your growth and innovation and strategy?
We are announcing something, but I can’t reveal all the details just yet. What I can share is that next year will be a World Cup year, a football year, and the world will be watching. Lexar is planning something related to football – that’s all I can say for now!
Image Credit: Lexar
