Micron Crushes Earnings. The Stock Is Rising.

Management of Micron Technology said demand for memory chips will exceed the supply for the foreseeable future. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Micron Technology exceeded Q1 earnings expectations with $4.78 EPS on $13.6 billion of revenue, surpassing estimates.
• Micron projects revenue for the current quarter will land in a range with a midpoint of $18.7 billion, significantly above analysts’ $14.3 billion forecast.
• The company’s stock rose 7% in after-hours trading. Management expects the the demand for memory chips will exceed the supply for the foreseeable future.

Micron Technology reported better-than-expected earnings results Wednesday afternoon. Its stock was up sharply in the Thursday premarket.

For the November quarter, the chip company reported earnings per share of $4.78, compared to Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $3.96, according to FactSet. Revenue came in at $13.6 billion, which was above analysts’ expectations of $12.9 billion.

Guidance was also strong. For the current quarter, Micron forecast a revenue range with a midpoint of $18.7 billion, above analysts’ expectations of $14.3 billion.

“We anticipate our business performance to continue strengthening through fiscal 2026,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in the earnings release. “We are investing to support our customers’ growing need for memory and storage.”

Micron shares rose as much as 7% in after-hours trading following the release and was up 10% in the Thursday premarket.

Micron is a leader in the markets for dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, used in desktop computers and servers, and for flash memory, found in smartphones and solid-state hard drives. It has also become a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, for artificial-intelligence servers.

On the call with analysts, Micron management said the market for HBM memory will grow from $35 billion this year to $100 billion in 2028. The company said the supply of memory chips will be “substantially short” of demand for the “foreseeable future.”

On Tuesday, Needham analyst N. Quinn Bolton raised his price target for Micron Technology stock to $300 from $200. He reaffirmed his Buy rating for the shares.

“Demand conditions in the data center market remain robust,” he wrote. “We expect the surge in spot market pricing [for memory chips] should drive higher contract pricing over the next several quarters.”

As of the close on Wednesday, Micron shares were up 168% this year, compared with an 18% gain for the Nasdaq Composite index.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com