SanDisk is expected to swing to a $5.5 billion quarterly profit, while investors watch whether stronger guidance can justify lofty expectations after steep sector-wide declines.
SanDisk and Western Digital report after the U.S. market close on Wednesday, with investors focused on whether management can reinforce the AI demand story after a bruising July for storage shares. SanDisk fell 47% in July, erasing more than $150 billion in market value, though it still shows a 501% year-to-date gain and has bounced 6% on Monday and 11% on Tuesday; Western Digital is down 26% from its June 18 record, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index dropped 21% in July, its worst month since 2008. Bloomberg consensus sees SanDisk swinging to a $5.5 billion fiscal fourth-quarter profit on revenue above $8.6 billion, versus a $23 million loss a year earlier, while Western Digital is expected to post $3.71 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings per share of $3.35. Cavenagh Research said NAND flash memory (flash-based storage chips) pricing, enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) demand and customer commitments are running ahead of SanDisk's prior guidance, while Amazon and Microsoft have backed continued AI infrastructure spending. The setup remains fragile after SK Hynix's brief 30% intraday slide on an earnings miss, even as SanDisk now trades near 7x forward price-to-earnings ratio, 25 of 30 Bloomberg-tracked analysts rate it a Buy, and the twin results are viewed as a key test of whether the storage sector can stabilize and rebound.