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SanDisk's 13.67% pop wasn't a beat-and-raise — it was a re-rating on three years of guidance that shouldn't even be possible in memory
That's the part worth sitting with. NAND has always been a boom-bust commodity business — pricing power evaporates the moment supply catches up. Nobody guides three years out in this industry because nobody's ever been able to.
SanDisk just did anyway: mid-to-high-teens revenue growth through FY2028–30, ~80% adjusted gross margins, ~75% operating margins, ~50% free cash flow margins, and a commitment to return all excess cash to shareholders. Management's argument for why this time is different: demand is outrunning supply into 2028, with the NAND market seen crossing $300B this year and $500B by 2027 on AI-driven storage demand — plus a technology story (BiCS10, 59% bit-density gains, High Bandwidth Flash for AI inference) to back the margin claims.
The tell that the market believes it: this wasn't a solo move. Micron +6%, Western Digital +8%, SK Hynix +8%, and the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) +5% all caught a bid off SanDisk's print. That's a sector re-rating, not a single-stock story.
The real question isn't whether the targets are believable today — it's whether "AI demand keeps supply tight through 2028" holds up as a structural thesis, or whether it's the same cyclical promise memory investors have been burned by before, just with better slides this time.
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- pangngk·08-14I dug up 2018 Micron decks too — same tight-supply sermon, different AI costume lol. 80% gross margin in memory still sounds like peak-cycle fanfic to me. What's the capex escape hatch this time?LikeReport