Micron Out-Earned Apple Last Quarter, Yet It’s Worth 1/6 as Much. One of Those Two Things Is Wrong Roxanna Maglangit Thu, November 12, 2026 at 7:23 AM EST 5 min read MU -4.29% AAPL +0.40% 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 earned $37.7 billion in its quarter to Sept. 3, more than Apple's $30.7 billion in its quarter to Sept. 26, yet Micron's stock market value is roughly a sixth of Apple's.
The earnings are real, and the thing that looks wrong is a price that assumes they're about to collapse.
Micron's profit came almost entirely from higher memory prices, and its forward P/E is close to where it traded at the peak of the last cycle, before its EPS fell 79%.
Micron says most of the new supply that could end the shortage arrives in late 2028 or later, and its December report is the next test.
Micron Technology (MU:NASDAQ) earned more money last quarter than Apple (AAPL:NASDAQ). (Yes, that Apple.)
Micron's net income was $37.7 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Sept. 3. Apple's was $30.7 billion for its quarter ended Sept. 26, a September-quarter record.
One investor on Reddit's r/stocks pointed out the comparison on Monday, writing that Micron "out-earned Apple last qtr and is worth a 6th as much." The poster put Micron's market value at roughly $800 billion and Apple's at roughly $5.1 trillion, and offered a reason: "The market is treating memory profit as peak cycle money and Apple's as permanent and that could be right."
Both earnings figures check out, so it all comes down to how long Micron's lasts.
Analysts don't expect Micron's profit to fade anytime soon. Their consensus has normalized EPS more than doubling from fiscal 2026's $75.52 to $176.50 in fiscal 2027, then staying above $200 through fiscal 2029:
Micron's own guidance points the same way. It guided the quarter ending in early December to $61.5 billion of revenue, give or take $1.5 billion, at about an 86% gross margin, up from $54.2 billion last quarter. And it says more than 75% of its fiscal 2027 shipments are already committed.
Yet the stock, down more than 40% from its June high, trades at about 4x forward earnings. Put differently, if analysts are right, Micron would earn its entire market value in roughly four years.
TIKR tracks 49 analysts on Micron. How many say "Buy"?
See the full breakdown of Buy, Hold, and Sell ratings on Micron, along with Wall Street's revenue and earnings estimates, all in one place. More than 500,000 investors use TIKR to research stocks like this one. See Micron's Analyst Ratings
Part of the reason is how fast this profit showed up. Micron earned $3.2 billion in the quarter to Aug. 28, 2025, and its net income has risen every quarter since:
That's 11.8x in a year, while Apple's quarterly net income grew 12%. And nearly all of it came from price: Micron's DRAM prices rose about 180% in fiscal 2026 and its NAND prices about 200%, while the bits it shipped grew in the mid-20% range.
Prices like that have reversed before. Micron's gross margin fell from 45.2% in fiscal 2022 to 2.7% in fiscal 2023, and its EPS fell 79%, from $11.51 in fiscal 2018 to $2.37 in fiscal 2020. Its forward P/E is now near the bottom of its range since 2014, close to where it traded in 2017 and 2018, right as that last cycle peaked.
A collapse like that needs new supply, and Micron says most of it won't come for a while. On its Sept. 30 call, Micron said most of the construction spending it added for fiscal 2027 goes to clean rooms that open in late 2028 and beyond. A possible new rival looks less likely too: TSMC told Barron's on Nov. 9 that its mission is serving the "global logic IC industry," playing down reports that it might make memory.
Meanwhile, buyers are still paying up. Apple said on its fourth-quarter call that its net income would have been higher without the component crunch, and memory prices are squeezing its margins. Some of Apple's lost margin is showing up as memory makers' profit.
Demand could still crack first. UBS analysts said on Nov. 6 that construction pauses after the Democrats' midterm sweep could put around 30% of the US data-center capacity expected in 2028 at risk, and 2028 is the year analysts expect Micron's EPS to peak.
The way I see it, the valuation is the thing that's wrong. At about 4x forward earnings, the market is pricing a downturn that doesn't show up in Micron's guidance or in analysts' estimates before 2028, and Micron's supply timeline says the shortage lasts at least that long. Apple deserves a premium, since its profit doesn't jump elevenfold in a year, but this gap assumes Micron's downturn has already started.
Micron reports again in December, and management expects that quarter's gross margin to be fiscal 2027's lowest. Of course, memory has surprised investors on the way down before, and if new capacity shows up early, 4x won't look so cheap.
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR's valuation model and see what Micron could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It's free to use.
