SanDisk Corp

NAND Flash sales were up 35% for the first six months of 2014, as volumes increased amid a 17% fall in average selling prices or ASPs.

NetApp’s cash-to-debt ratio in 1Q16 was 3.33x—higher than the 1.36x industry median. Its operating income was -$26 million.

The financial stability of a company is determined by understanding its debt level and its capability to meet long-term and short-term debt obligations.

Micron’s stock has surged on bullish earnings prospects, and it’s up more than 200% since the beginning of 2013, partly propelled by the acquisition of Elpida last year.

JAT Capital sold its position in SanDisk Corporation (SNDK) in 4Q14. The position had represented 1.2% of the fund’s third-quarter portfolio.

Semiconductor manufacturing is complex and involves design, fabrication, assembly, and testing. Building a fab requires investments of $3–4 billion.

Intel generated TTM returns of -16.66%, 9.26% in the trailing one month. It generated -20.03% YTD. Its share price fell by 1.53% in the trailing five days.

To acquire SanDisk, Western Digital has offered SanDisk shareholders $86.50 per share. This is approximately 15% premium to SanDisk’s closing share price on October 20, 2015.

John Griffin’s Blue Ridge bought a stake in Apple Inc. (AAPL) last quarter. The stock accounts for a 1.85% position in the fund’s portfolio.

Point72 reduced its position in Micron Technology. It sold 4,792,200 shares during 4Q14. The shares accounted for 0.28% of the fund’s total 4Q14 portfolio.

IBM’s 2Q15 results marked 13 straight quarters of falling revenue. This trend continued in fiscal 3Q15 when IBM failed to report any revenue growth.

SanDisk (SNDK) was founded in 1988. It’s a pioneer in flash memory technology. It designs, develops, and manufactures NAND flash memory storage solutions.

Western Digital reported 4Q15 revenues of $3.2 billion—a 10.11% decrease compared to 3Q15 and 12.59% lower than its 4Q14 revenues.

SanDisk (SNDK) is considered a pioneer in flash memory. As the cloud is increasingly adopted for data storage, consumers and enterprises are likely to opt for SSDs rather than HDDs in new systems.

Western Digital generated $488 million in cash from operations in 4Q15, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $5 billion.

Seagate’s shares fell by 13% in the week ending January 22, after Mizuho cut its price target for STX from $38 to $32 and provided a “neutral” rating.

In fiscal 3Q16, Seagate reported revenues of $2.6 billion and a gross margin of 20.2%. Its net loss was $21 million, with diluted EPS of -$0.07.

If it’s true that Apple is changing its preference to Samsung, SanDisk will lose a very important customer, which will negatively impact SanDisk’s top line.

The Technology, Hardware, and Storage subsector generated returns of -0.97% in the last week, compared with 0.69% for XLK. As a whole, the subgroup is trending down due to lower demand for computers.

Increased contribution of the embedded solutions segment towards SanDisk’s overall revenues is a positive sign.

In fiscal 3Q16, Micron’s SBU (Storage Business Unit) revenue fell by 20% on both a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis to $719 million.

Marvell’s rich patent portfolio makes it an ideal acquisition target for China, which is looking to acquire multinational semiconductor companies.

Let’s dig into the cause of Marvell’s accounting issues, see how one thing led to another, and look at how its new management plans to untangle the chaos.

Micron is moving a step further and developing 3D NAND Generation 2 technology. It expects to bring this into production in fiscal 2Q17.

This earnings season is full of surprises for the semiconductor industry. SanDisk (SNDK) has now posted surprising results for fiscal 1Q16, which ended April 3, 2016.

Recently, Seagate Technology (STX) announced its preliminary earnings results and lowered its revenue and margin estimates for fiscal 3Q16.

On a non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, Micron Technology’s gross margin fell from 34% in fiscal 2Q15 to 20% in fiscal 2Q16.

From a purely NAV (net asset value) return standpoint, the Vanguard Capital Opportunity Fund has had a forgettable one-year period until March 18, 2016, as it stood tenth among its peer group.

The overlap of products and customers between SanDisk and Western Digital would help reduce $180 million in operating expenses over the next 18 months.

The merger will create a company with nearly $20 billion in combined revenue. It would be able to capitalize on the enterprise storage products market.

Unisplendour backed out of the deal to acquire a 15% stake in Western Digital for ~$3.8 billion. Investors wondered if the merger deal would come through.

Last week, Tsinghua Unigroup’s subsidiary Unisplendour announced that its board of directors decided to terminate its investment plan in leading data storage company Western Digital (WDC).

Alken stated that in light of changing market dynamics and the capital market scenario, the $19 billion price for SanDisk, which has been posting declining earnings in fiscal 2015, is too high.

Samsung (SSNLF) accounts for 30% of the NAND flash market as of 3Q15. Other players in this space include Toshiba (TOSYY) and SanDisk (SNDK).

Though it failed to report revenue growth, IBM’s revenue and EPS of $22.1 billion and $4.84 beat analysts’ expectations by $20 million and $0.03 per share.

On January 19, 2016, IBM will release its fiscal 4Q15 results. In the last 14 consecutive quarters, IBM has not reported any revenue growth. IBM beat Thomson Reuters’s consensus EPS estimate of $3.30 in fiscal 3Q15.

Although Apple (AAPL) has continued to post record-breaking earnings in 2015, it still fell 3.8% for the year. The negative calendar year returns were the first since 2008.

Micron’s technology transition will slow down the output and revenue in the short term. The company will be able to meet advanced memory products’ needs.

Toshiba is looking to start an evaluation system for the CEO and president of the company, in which 120 senior managers will hold a vote of confidence in January 2016.

The ClearBridge Aggressive Growth Fund’s assets were invested in 78 holdings in stocks, bonds, and cash as of November 2015. The fund managed $14.04 billion in assets as of the end of November.

Growth in the NAND industry has slowed from more than 100% during 2005–2010 to ~50% during 2010–2015. Micron is responding to this trend by ramping up production of 3D NAND at its Singapore fabrication plant.

In fiscal 2Q16, Symantec—as expected with the $8 billion sale of Veritas—announced the buyback of $500 million in shares.

The third-largest flash memory manufacturer in the world, SanDisk has a market cap of $15.04 billion. Western Digital follows with a market cap of $14.3 billion.

With the action on the acquisition front, including the SanDisk acquisition, Western Digital is geared up to increase and enhance its presence in the SSD arena.

Western Digital (WDC) and Micron (MU) held 10.2% and 5.1% of the market share, respectively, in the enterprise SSD space.

On October 8, 2015, SanDisk (SNDK) announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ).

Micron Technology operates in the capital-intensive industry of semiconductors, wherein companies’ expense structures acutely impact their profit margins.

Macroeconomic factors like the Greek debt crisis, the declining Chinese stock market, and global growth issues have made tech stocks not so attractive.

According to DRAMeXchange, the NAND flash memory market is expected to grow at 12% in 2015. It is projected to grow rapidly, with double-digit growth, in the next few years.

In this series, we’ll analyze the YTD performance of firms in the Technology, Hardware, and Storage subsector and that are a part of the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK).

After memory chips, LEDs comprise the second most produced semiconductor products in South Korea. The country accounts for ~13% of the global LED market.

Tremendous global growth in digital content is expected to drive demand for storage capacity in order to host, distribute, manage, and aggregate digital content.

Although SanDisk (SNDK) has declared better-than-estimated 2Q15 results, the company’s revenue fell 24% year-over-year and 7% quarter-over-quarter.

Through the Micron Technology (MU) acquisition, Tsinghua Group would get access to DRAM and NAND memory chips used in personal computers.

3D NAND overcomes the density limit associated within the planar (or 2D) NAND architecture.

Currently, SanDisk’s (SNDK) EPS is $4.52 greater than the industry average of $4.05 in XLK. Its diluted EPS is $4.23. The subsector’s average is $3.94.

On June 26, 2015, Micron (MU) shares fell ~19%. The company failed to meet Wall Street expectations on both revenues and earnings in fiscal 3Q15.

Sandisk has generated returns of -3.30% in the last week, compared with returns of -0.97% for the Technology, Hardware, and Storage subsector and 0.69% for XLK.

The Technology Hardware & Storage subsector underperformed the most since the beginning of January 2015. The stocks have primarily generated negative returns.

In January 2015, SanDisk cut its revenue outlook for 4Q15 to $1.73 billion from an earlier estimate of $1.8 billion–$1.85 billion. SanDisk’s share price declined by more than 11% following the announcement.

Micron Technology remains a fundamentally strong company. The volume of its products should rise substantially, given the increasing use of memory in mobile devices.

Although Seagate’s 3Q15 earnings missed analyst expectations, the firm’s fundamentals seem strong. Its net cash flow from operations increased by 68.57% to $1.4 billion, compared with 3Q14.

Only EMC’s (EMC) Information Infrastructure segment posted negative growth. Its revenue stood at $4.05 billion—a decline of 1% on a YoY basis.

Factors responsible for SanDisk’s dismal performance in 1Q15 include in-product issues, a shift of PCIe TAM, pricing issues, and supply challenges.

As of 3Q14, Texas Instruments generated an operating cash flow of $2.62 billion. It holds cash and short-term investments worth $3.19 billion and carries a total debt of $4.64 billion.

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard (or HP) (HPQ) launched HP P10000 3PAR Storage Systems, in accordance with its Software defined storage strategy. When it was built, it kept the enterprise-class virtual and cloud-based data centers in mind. This move was achieved through HP’s acquisition of 3PAR—a leading global provider of utility storage—in September 2010 for $2.35 billion.

SanDisk has expressly shown its intention of capturing a lead space in the enterprise storage market. Its slew of acquisitions, the most recent being Fusion-io, demonstrates its ambition and plans to spruce up its enterprise storage offerings.

“Big Data’s” arrival and the transition of enterprise preference from HDDs to SSDs is creating new opportunities in the flash memory and SSD space.

SanDisk is aggressively pursuing its strategy to expand its enterprise storage portfolio. It has joined hands with industry leaders to form a symbiotic relationship.

According to market research firm IHS iSuppli, demand for SSDs is expected to grow more than 40% each in 2014 and 2015.

Micron expects the total industry bit supply growth to be around 23% in 2014, and it predicts about 25% growth beyond 2014. This is good news for Micron.

In the fourth quarter, Blue Ridge sold its stake in Ralph Lauren Corp. (RL). Ralph Lauren was a 1.80% position in the fund’s 3Q portfolio.