Sandisk used its Aug. 13 investor day to lay out a long-range financial model that sits well above market expectations and puts its in-house High Bandwidth Flash, or HBF, at the center of the story. The company said its long-term sustainable model, based on average performance across FY2028 to FY2030, calls for revenue growth in the mid-to-high teens, a Non-GAAP gross margin of about 80%, a Non-GAAP operating margin of roughly 75%, adjusted free cash flow margin near 50%, and capital intensity in the mid-single digits as a percentage of revenue. Mizuho Securities kept its Outperform rating on Sandisk and set a $1,900 price target, arguing that the company’s framework, buyback capacity, and exposure to AI infrastructure support upside. Sandisk also detailed the positioning of HBF, saying the product can deliver comparable read bandwidth to HBM at about one-eighth the cost, while offering 8x to 16x more capacity in a similar package footprint. The company tied that pitch to memory-heavy AI inference workloads and said HBF is meant to work alongside HBM rather than replace it.

Morgan Stanley semiconductor chief analyst Shawn Kim has reversed the cautious call he made in July on memory stocks, saying the harshest phase of the recent correction is nearing an end. In his latest report, Kim described the pullback as a temporary disruption inside an "AI supercycle" rather than a turn in industry fundamentals. He linked the July sell-off in Korean equities and the memory supply chain to the unwinding of leveraged AI hedge fund positions, retail margin deleveraging, and profit-taking after memory price growth peaked on a year-over-year basis. The bank said memory valuations have fallen to unusually low levels, with the sector trading at about 3x forward 12-month earnings, and argued that the market is assigning little to no long-term growth premium. Morgan Stanley also said the pace of earnings downgrades has cooled sharply from prior highs. Looking ahead, the report forecasts a later-cycle transition in the memory industry in the fourth quarter of 2026, with stock drivers shifting toward shareholder returns, long-term agreements, and free cash flow. Despite making different earnings revisions for the two companies, the bank kept a bullish stance on both SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics and said each has implied upside of more than 60% from current share prices.

Kioxia has started mass production of its 10th-generation BiCS 10 332-layer 3D NAND this year and introduced the CM10 data-center eSSD with PCIe 6.0 support. Sequential read performance is up 92% from the previous generation. The company plans to start volume production of UFS 5.0 embedded storage by the end of this year, with data transfer speeds roughly twice those of UFS 4.1, targeting on-device AI mobile devices. According to TrendForce, Kioxia held a 13.9% share of the global NAND market in the first quarter, ranking third behind Samsung Electronics at 31.6% and SK Hynix at 17.6%. Samsung, for its part, began mass producing the PCIe 6.0 eSSD PM1763 last month, built on 9th-generation V-NAND and a 4nm controller, with UFS 5.0 scheduled for fourth-quarter production. Samsung also said it started volume production of 10th-generation V-NAND, roughly 430 layers, this month, applying hybrid bonding and a triple-stack process for the first time. Industry analysts say Kioxia is competitive in technology iteration speed, though its production capacity still trails the Korean makers, and competition in the AI storage market is expected to intensify.

SK Hynix reported record second-quarter revenue and operating profit after the U.S. market closed on July 28, but both figures came in below analyst estimates, leaving investors focused on whether AI-driven memory demand can keep supporting elevated valuations. The company said operating profit rose 557% year over year to KRW 60.5 trillion, while revenue increased 257% to KRW 79.3 trillion, both quarterly highs. Consensus had been around KRW 64.2 trillion for operating profit and KRW 83.9 trillion for revenue. The company said it remains positive on demand and has finalized long-term agreements with about 10 customers, while continuing talks with other major industry clients. It added that HBM4 has reached the operating speeds customers require and began mass shipments in the second quarter, with output set to expand further in the second half. HBM4E samples were also sent to major customers in the first half. The report pointed to three reasons for the earnings shortfall versus expectations: a high mix of HBM sales, slower quarter-on-quarter price increases for commodity memory, and long-term supply agreements that limited upside from spot price gains. SK Hynix also disclosed stronger cash flow, higher cash holdings, lower debt, and plans to keep raising capital spending as it pushes ahead with M15X, the Yongin clean room, advanced packaging, and NAND capacity projects.

SK Hynix posted record results for the second quarter of fiscal 2026, reporting revenue of KRW 79.3 trillion, or about $52.9 billion, up 257% from a year earlier and 51% from the previous quarter. Operating profit came in at KRW 60.5 trillion, while net profit reached KRW 93.9 trillion. The company said net income included a one-off gain of about KRW 62.2 trillion from the sale of its Kioxia stake. Even with those record figures, the results missed market expectations. Reported revenue was below the consensus estimate of KRW 83.9 trillion, and operating profit fell short of the expected KRW 64.2 trillion. After the earnings release, SK Hynix ADRs dropped more than 5% in after-hours trading. The company attributed growth to stronger volume and pricing for AI-focused high-performance products including HBM and eSSD. HBM4 entered mass production shipments in the second quarter, with output set to expand in the second half, while HBM4E samples have already been delivered. SK Hynix also said it has signed long-term supply agreements with about 10 customers, covering roughly 50% of sales volume, and expects 2026 capital expenditure to land at the upper end of its KRW 40 trillion to KRW 50 trillion range.

Citrini analyst Jukan pushed back on recent bearish notes around NAND and negative headlines tied to QLC pricing talks, arguing that the market has overstated the read-through from those reports. He said SanDisk accepting a price below its initial quote in a long-term agreement with Meta was not surprising, because the company has been one of the most aggressive NAND suppliers in pursuing LTAs and plans to allocate more than 50% of its total shipments to such contracts. In that context, taking an LTA price below the current quarter’s contract level should not be used to conclude that SanDisk cannot redirect all orders to higher-bidding North American customers. Jukan also addressed talk that Chinese module makers failed to sell eSSD products to domestic cloud service providers, saying the issue was that Chinese CSPs can buy directly from YMTC rather than a sign of weak demand. On concerns that hyperscalers are pushing down QLC eSSD pricing and leaving some volume unsold, he said newer cloud players have enough demand to absorb that supply. Jukan ended by saying weak performance in storage stocks tends to amplify negative headlines even when fundamentals have not materially worsened. He reiterated that he remains bullish on storage. He had previously said DRAM contract prices still have about 40% upside through the end of 2027 and that HBM supply remains tight.

SK Hynix made its Nasdaq debut on July 10 Beijing time, with its shares rising more than 18% intraday and its market capitalization closing at $1.22 trillion, or roughly RMB 8.3 trillion. The company raised $26.5 billion through an American depositary receipt offering, setting what the source described as the largest U.S. IPO ever by a foreign company and placing it behind only SpaceX, which went public last month, in the global all-time IPO rankings. The listing caps a long turnaround story. Founded in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, the business expanded through its acquisition of LG Semiconductor in 1999 but later fell into distress as memory prices collapsed and debt mounted. Its memory operations were spun off in 2001 into Hynix Semiconductor, which remained under creditor control until SK Group acquired it in 2011. The company was renamed SK Hynix in 2012. Its long bet on high bandwidth memory, or HBM, became central to that recovery. After years of investment, SK Hynix became a key supplier of HBM3 for Nvidia’s H100 chips following the AI surge that accelerated after ChatGPT emerged in 2022. The report says the company now holds 58% of the global HBM market. It also points to strong profit margins, a sharp share-price gain, and rising investor attention toward Chinese memory makers such as CXMT, which is scheduled to open its share subscription on July 16.

Micron's latest earnings for FY2026 Q3 reported revenue of $41.46 billion, beating estimates by nearly $6 billion, with gross margin guidance of 86%. The stock surged 13–14% after hours, pushing market cap above $1.16 trillion. Despite year-to-date gains of over 300%, the forward P/E of the top three memory makers (Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung) sits at just 6–10x, compared to NVIDIA's 23x and the semiconductor median of 36x. Analysts argue that HBM demand has broken the long-standing DRAM cost decline curve, transforming memory from a commodity into a luxury good. The upcoming earnings season includes TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Western Digital. Importantly, NAND supply is even tighter than HBM, with Western Digital and SanDisk being the best-performing S&P 500 stocks in 2026, signaling NAND could be the next major theme.