NVDA Who? Micron Blows Doors Off Q3 Earnings, Revs

Micron (MU - Free Report) became the latest “ground zero” stock of the AI trade, putting up NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) -like boffo earnings figures for its fiscal Q3 after today’s closing bell. Earnings of $25.11 per share easily surpassed the Zacks consensus of $20.98, which had been an estimated gain of +998% year over year. Today’s amazing figure represents +1215% earnings growth in one year. Even at NVIDIA’s best, they weren’t throwing up +1200% gains.

And that’s just for starters. Micron’s Q3 revenues of $41.46 billion zoomed past the $36.52 billion analysts had been expecting, for an astounding year-over-year revenue gain of +345.8%. Operating Cash Flow ballooned up to $25.39 billion in the quarter, for a +113.4% gain — quarter over quarter. Cloud Memory gained +78% on the operating side, Core Data Center grew +83%. 

Guidance for next quarter at Micron also does not disappoint. Earnings of $30-32 per share are now expected, well up from the $24.91 in the Zacks consensus. Revenues are projected to be between $49-51 billion, well aloft of the estimate for $42.64 billion. In the year-ago quarter, the company brought in sales of $11 billion. This amounts to +454% top-line growth in a year. The company expects to return, it says, 100% of “excess cash” to shareholders at some point.

This tells us, like an air-horn in a closed setting, that the AI trade is far from over. Wobbly markets here at home and over in the KOSPI in South Korea showed some risk aversion to taking the AI trade up higher. This is especially due to the highly concentrated ETFs that focused on SK Hynix, which surpassed Samsung in market cap and both, like Micron, have entered the trillion-dollar market cap space. As an aside, Zacks ETF Strategist Neena Mishra wrote about this earlier today in her excellent Fund Newsletter, which you can access here.

Micron shares are up +14% on the news in after-hours trading. Shares are up +267% year-to-date and +719% since this time last year. The Idaho-based company has single-handedly made people forget about the potato industry. More importantly for the AI trade in general, we expect the recent sell-off to become nice entry points.