SSD leader SanDisk (SNDK.US) received a bullish call from Morgan Stanley against the market trend: the target price was raised to $273, maintaining a "buy" rating.

Wall Street financial giant Morgan Stanley recently raised the target price of global SSD storage product leader SanDisk (SNDK.US) from $263 to $273, while maintaining a "hold" rating. It is worth noting that this view was released at a time when the market was selling off global storage product stocks due to concerns about increased capital expenditure and the possibility of easing supply shortages. However, Morgan Stanley believes that the market's reaction is unfounded, and this has not shaken its positive assessment of the industry's fundamentals. Morgan Stanley's analyst team further pointed out that recent reports of tightening memory chip supply and continuing price increase trends actually suggest that storage companies focused on DRAM and NAND sectors are expected to achieve significantly strong profits in the near future. SanDisk announced impressive financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 last month, along with better-than-expected strong future performance guidance: the company achieved record revenue of $2.3 billion, a 21% increase from the previous quarter and a 23% increase from the same period last year; non-GAAP earnings per share surged from $0.29 in the previous quarter to $1.22; inventory turnover days decreased from 135 days to 115 days. In addition, the company expects revenue for the second quarter to be in the range of $2.55 billion to $2.65 billion. SanDisk focuses on business development in global markets, including the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and other international regions, dedicated to developing, manufacturing, and selling various data storage devices and solutions based on NAND flash technology. In February 2025, storage product giant Western Digital Corporation (WDC.US) completed the spin-off of its flash business, and SanDisk, operating as an independent company, primarily took over the NAND Flash chip and SSD storage product business. SSD is a solid-state hard drive storage product mainly using NAND Flash as the storage medium, appearing externally as a "disk" that can be directly installed in computers, servers, and data centers. SanDisk operates in an "oligopoly competition structure," with its market size only trailing behind Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Since successfully splitting from Western Digital Corporation in 2025, SanDisk's stock price has skyrocketed by nearly 500%, benefiting from the unprecedented surge in storage demand driven by the AI wave. Looking at the close to $1.4 trillion AI compute infrastructure agreements signed by OpenAI and the progress of the "Stargate" AI infrastructure project, these super AI infrastructure projects urgently require enterprise-level high-performance storage (core products including HBM storage systems, enterprise SSD/HDD, server-grade DDR5, etc.) on a massive scale, driving demand, prices, and stock prices of storage giants to soar.