I think MU stock will do well after today, though. Next Q sales and profits are going higher, and they said the quarter after that gross margins would likely trend higher, and I think sales as well. So, MU is heading into best ever record quarter sales and profits territory.
SIMO's commentary on 2025 matches MU's, with the first quarter being an inventory correction dip, and then strengthening from then out, in SIMO's case strengthening quite a lot.
MU also said some stuff about NAND replacing disk drives in the data center over time, and when/if that comes to pass it should help both them and SIMO, and the entire NAND industry. SIMO has been chattering about that future trend as well lately, and SIMO has introduced a first ever enterprise flash controller, probably targetting that technology shift.
The major problem with NAND (I think) is there are still too many players - MU, Samsung, SK, Sandisk, Kioxia and Chinese Yangste. Now that Sandisk is separate from Western Digital, maybe they can merge with Kioxia and take away one of the players. But even then, NAND will probably be less profitable than DRAM - HBM for a while, cuz for DRAM there's only three players (Samsung, SK, MU), and that keeps profits elevated.
I got the impression from the call that there's just way too much NAND capacity out there. |
