There’s a peculiar arithmetic at work in the memory-chip trade right now: record numbers can still add up to a falling share price. SanDisk delivered exactly that equation this week, posting blockbuster fourth-quarter results that were immediately overshadowed by a first-quarter forecast the market judged insufficient. The stock has been paying the price ever since, with the selloff extending across multiple sessions as investors recalibrate to a more cautious NAND pricing outlook.
The company reported revenue of $8.97 billion for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2026, a 372 percent surge year over year and a 51 percent sequential jump. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $39.25, comfortably ahead of the analyst range of $33.88 to $34.96. For the full fiscal year, revenue reached $20.25 billion, up 175 percent from the prior year, fueled by the AI-infrastructure boom that has sent demand for NAND flash memory into overdrive.
None of that was enough. The guidance for the first fiscal quarter of 2027 — revenue between $10.30 billion and $10.80 billion, with adjusted EPS of $44.00 to $46.00 — landed well short of the roughly $12.30 billion analysts had penciled in. The company also flagged a muted pricing trajectory in the NAND segment and a roughly flat gross margin on a sequential basis, a combination that gave investors ample reason to cash in gains.
The market’s response was swift. The shares closed at €1,100.00 on Thursday, down 5.98 percent on the day, and the 30-day decline now stands at 27.63 percent. The stock sits 46.60 percent below its 52-week high, a stark reminder of how quickly sentiment can turn in a sector where expectations compound as fast as the technology itself.
Analysts Split Their Verdicts
Wall Street’s reaction came in two flavors: those who trimmed targets but kept the faith, and those who stepped back more decisively. Jefferies’ Blayne Curtis slashed his price objective from $3,000 to $1,750 while maintaining a “Buy” rating, pointing to the softening NAND pricing dynamics and the flat margin outlook embedded in the guidance. Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers went further, cutting his target from $1,620 to $1,400 and downgrading the stock to “Equal Weight,” citing valuation concerns and a margin-expansion story that has hit a plateau.
Others were less severe. Citigroup lowered its target from $2,500 to $2,100 while keeping a “Buy” stance, attributing the cut to a “subdued” pricing outlook for the September quarter. Evercore ISI trimmed from $3,100 to $2,800 with an “Outperform” rating intact. Mizuho also reduced its target but highlighted the company’s order backlog — a hefty $91 billion in remaining performance obligations that speaks to the durability of demand. Even before the earnings release, Susquehanna had cut its target from $3,250 to $3,050 in late July, an early sign that the euphoria was already beginning to fray.
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Buybacks, Contracts, and a New Memory Standard
Management, for its part, is signaling that it sees value where the market sees risk. The board approved an additional $14 billion share repurchase program, bringing total remaining buyback authorization to $15.5 billion — a meaningful statement of confidence in the company’s own valuation. The move dovetails with multi-year supply agreements that lock in more than half of planned bit production for fiscal 2027 and 65 percent for 2028, complete with price floors designed to tame the notoriously volatile NAND cycle. It’s an attempt to sell certainty rather than just capacity, a strategy aimed at breaking free from the industry’s boom-and-bust rhythm.
On the technology front, SanDisk made a notable move earlier in the week, publishing the technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) through the Open Compute Project alongside SK hynix, Google, and Tenstorrent. The standard is tailored for AI inference systems, and while the immediate commercial impact is hard to quantify, it positions the company in the fast-growing market for AI-optimized memory infrastructure.
There are also signals from the ownership side. Jane Street Group disclosed a 5.00 percent stake in the company, representing 7,409,437 shares. Meanwhile, Chief Legal Officer Bernard Shek sold 600 shares at an average price of $1,162.16 under a pre-arranged trading plan — a routine transaction with no direct bearing on the current business trajectory. Regulatory filings over the past three months show net insider selling of $10.9 million with no documented insider purchases, a detail that carries more weight than usual given the market’s current mood.
A Footnote From the Former Parent
One indirect measure of how far SanDisk has come: Western Digital, which spun off the memory maker in February 2025, recorded a $2.05 billion valuation gain in its own fourth fiscal quarter from its remaining stake in the company. That gain underscores the dramatic appreciation in SanDisk’s worth since the separation — even as the recent pullback has taken some of the shine off.
The Next Test Arrives in August
All eyes now turn to the Investor Day scheduled for August 13, where management is expected to lay out its long-term technology roadmap and the ramp-up of enterprise SSD production. For investors nursing losses from the post-earnings slide, it represents the next opportunity to hear whether the company can convert its order backlog and contract structure into a narrative that holds up against the market’s skepticism. The relative strength index sits at 43.0, indicating neither overbought nor oversold conditions — a technical reflection of a stock caught between short-term uncertainty and a longer-term growth story that remains, for now, intact.
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