When Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) reported its fiscal second-quarter results late on Thursday, investors and analysts alike were thrilled and shares were up over 13%. As a result, analysts took the opportunity to adjust their price targets for this semiconductor giant.
24/7 Wall St. has included some highlights from the earnings report, as well was what Credit Suisse and a few other analysts said after the fact.
The company said that it had $0.90 in earnings per share (EPS) and $4.65 billion in revenue, compared with consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters that called for $0.85 in EPS and revenue of $4.64 billion. The same period of last year reportedly had a net loss of $0.05 per share and $2.93 billion in revenue.
Rising revenues in the quarter were primarily the result of a 21% increase in DRAM average selling prices and an 18% increase in trade NAND sales volumes. The company’s overall consolidated gross margin of 36.7% for the quarter was 11.2 percentage points higher sequentially due to increases in DRAM average selling prices and manufacturing cost reductions for both NAND and DRAM.
Credit Suisse has an Outperform rating and raised its price target to $40 from $35. The firm also had raised it just two days before. The brokerage firm said:
We are raising our fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018 EPS to $4.09 and $5.25 from $3.26 and $4.03 and raising our price target to $40 from $35. While Micron is clearly benefiting from better cyclical pricing, the more important drivers seem more sustainable – mix, cost-downs, and scale efficiencies. Specifically, we believe fiscal third quarter guidance assumes price declines from fiscal second quarter ending run-rates bolstered by positive mix shift to enterprise/cloud SSDs, cost downs for 20nm/1xnm DRAM and 3-D NAND, and lower OpEx. While it’s impossible to completely assuage risk of a cyclical peak, our analysis continues to point to tight supply in DRAM thru calendar 2017, in NAND thru at least calendar third quarter 2017 – with memory becoming structurally more important to system performance and TCO.
A few other analysts weighed in on Micron as well:
- Stifel raised its price target to $47 from $40.
- Citigroup raised its price target to $45 from $35.
- Needham has a Buy rating and raised its target to $50 from $42.
- Susquehanna raised its price target to $35.
- Deutsche Bank raised its price target from $30 to $35.
- Goldman Sachs raised its price target to $32 from $30.
- Barclays raised its price target to $35 from $26.
Shares of Micron were traded up 13% at $29.50 on Friday morning, with a consensus analyst price target of $32.88 and a 52-week trading range of $9.35 to $29.87.
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