Micron Technology is heading into its fiscal third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday with Wall Street expecting numbers that would have looked impossible just two years ago.
The stock dropped 13.2% on Tuesday — its largest single-day loss in over a year — after a sell-off in memory peers Samsung and SK Hynix on the KOSPI Index rattled investors. MU recovered somewhat, rising 4.2% in premarket trading Wednesday.
Analysts are expecting EPS of $20.83, up from just $1.91 in the same quarter last year. That’s nearly a tenfold jump. Revenue is projected at around $35.9 billion, up roughly 285% year-over-year.
Gross margin is the number to watch. Wall Street sees it at an all-time high of 81% — a 432% markup on costs. That figure is a direct read on Micron’s pricing power and where the inventory cycle stands.
Micron stock is still up 268% year-to-date despite Tuesday’s drop. It trades at just 9.5 times projected earnings over the next 12 months, compared to 20.8 for the S&P 500.
Wedbush’s Matt Bryson raised his price target from $550 to $1,300 and kept a Buy rating. He cited NAND and DRAM pricing in Q2 of calendar 2026 that spiked by “high double to even triple digits.”
Rosenblatt’s Kevin Cassidy doubled his target from $600 to $1,200, also with a Buy. He’s pointing to a “stronger for longer memory cycle” and says new wafer supply won’t hit the market for at least another year.
Needham’s Quinn Bolton went furthest, raising his target 210% from $500 to $1,550. He expects market fundamentals to stay strong due to high demand, firm pricing, and limited new capacity.
Overall, MU has 24 Buy ratings and 2 Holds. The average price target sits at $1,296.80, implying about 23% upside.
The context here matters. When the AI data-center boom kicked off in 2024, Micron was coming out of one of its worst down-cycles ever. The company posted four straight quarters of negative gross margin in 2023.
That brutal downturn made Micron and its rivals reluctant to expand capacity. No major new manufacturing capacity is expected until roughly a year from now, with more coming in 2028 and 2029.
The result: memory prices are at record highs and aren’t showing signs of softening.
The crunch is rippling through to consumer devices. Prices for PCs, smartphones, and game consoles are rising. Even Apple is expected to raise prices due to memory shortages.
One Nvidia Vera Rubin AI server uses the memory equivalent of roughly 14,500 MacBook Neos — that gives a sense of the scale of demand hitting the market.
Q3 earnings drop Wednesday afternoon. Investors will be watching guidance for Q4 just as closely as the headline numbers — any sign of slowing growth or margin pressure could move the stock sharply.
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