Daniel Sparks, The Motley Fool Fri, October 16, 2026 at 3:57 AM EDT 5 min read MU +1.87% NVDA -1.84% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) hit its closing high of $1,213.56 on June 25, the day after the memory maker posted its fiscal third-quarter results. On Oct. 14, the stock ended at $914.13 -- around 25% below that record and its lowest close since Aug. 24.
Still, the company has beaten the outlook management gave on June 24, and Micron now sees tighter memory supply through fiscal 2028.
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I think the drop has more to do with where memory prices are heading than with anything going wrong at Micron. And at this price, the stock already reflects a lot of that risk.
When Micron reported in June, management called for fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $50 billion, plus or minus $1 billion, and around $31 in non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share. The company posted $54.2 billion in revenue and $33.42 in adjusted earnings per share in the quarter, which ended Sept. 3.
Both numbers topped the high end of management's guidance.
Showing how fast the business has grown, Micron's revenue climbed from $23.9 billion in fiscal Q2 to $41.5 billion in fiscal Q3 before reaching $54.2 billion in fiscal Q4. Also, management now forecasts around $61.5 billion in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, with adjusted per-share earnings of about $38. That per-share forecast is around 23% above the one investors had when the stock set its record.
Management's view of memory supply has become tighter, too. In June, it said it expected industry supply "to improve gradually in 2028."
"Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026," CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in his prepared remarks for the Sept. 30 call.
Customers have also committed to more of that demand. As Micron signed more multi-year supply deals, the contracted revenue it hadn't recognized yet (based on minimum prices) rose from over $5 billion at the end of fiscal Q3 to around $134 billion at the end of fiscal Q4.
Yet the pace of price increases has slowed. Micron's DRAM prices rose by a high-teens percentage from the previous quarter in fiscal Q4, down from a gain in the low 60s in fiscal Q3. Mark Murphy, Micron's chief financial officer, said the company expects "a more moderate rate of price increases" for the rest of fiscal 2027.
Spending's growing, too. Capital expenditures were around $27.4 billion in fiscal 2026. For the first half of fiscal 2027 alone, Micron expects around $25 billion, plus more in the second half. Most of the increase over its earlier plan is construction, mainly to speed up new cleanroom space (the factory floors where chips get made) for late calendar 2028 and beyond.
Memory booms tend to end when new supply catches up to demand. So slower price rises and a bigger building plan can look like early signs of a turn, even if that turn is years off.
Micron's rivals are working on more supply, too. Chinese memory maker CXMT said on Oct. 10 that it plans to launch a new generation of server memory based on a denser chip design by the end of 2026. I think worries like these, more than anything in Micron's results, explain the drop.
The sell-off has sent the stock's valuation down sharply. At its record close, Micron traded at about 27 times the earnings it had reported over the prior four quarters. It now trades around 12 times its fiscal 2026 earnings of $74.33 per share. That full year, of course, has two quarters when Micron earned under $13 a share.
On analysts' fiscal 2027 estimates, the stock trades closer to 5 times earnings.
Investors, in other words, are paying a price that assumes these profits won't last. Yes, that may prove true in time. After all, memory is a cyclical business. But it's a much lower price than investors paid in June for a company that has since beaten its own plan.
A few days ago, with the stock around $983, I said I'd consider buying shares before Micron's next report. Nothing since then has changed how I see the business, and the stock closed about 7% lower on Oct. 14.
So, is Micron a buy 25% below its record? I think so, for investors willing to buy and hold for the long haul -- through all the volatility. A memory stock can keep dropping for a while even when its results look great.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Micron Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Micron Stock Is 25% Below Its June Record. Is It a Buy Now? was originally published by The Motley Fool
