Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) stock rose over 2% on June 1st, 2018 on positive sentiment of Investors post the Bernstein’s 34th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference
The group sees positive industry drivers fueled by a solid demand drivers rising complexity of the technology transitions, both on the DRAM as well as the NAND front, and growing capital intensity involved with this transition, the memory industry on the supply side is stable
In 2017, over 22,000 billion gigabytes of data was created while a lot of that data got stored, and processed. By 2021 timeframe, this is expected to almost triple to about 62 billion gigabytes, 62,000 billion gigabytes by 2021 timeframe. Therefore huge growth in data that is ahead in memory and storage, DRAM and flash are core of these trends.
The group sees the data center as one of the biggest growth drivers projecting their growth to go from $29 billion of total available market opportunity for DRAM and flash as of 2017 to $62 billion by 2021, which is more than double growth. They need more fast memory that means DRAM. They need more fast storage that means more NAND.
Mobile opportunity is also adding almost $10 billion of total market opportunity for memory and fast storage between 2017 to 2021 timeframe. Even though automotive, is a small market, it is a fast-growing market and expected to lead to a huge opportunity as autonomous vehicles, which we call data center on wheels, require more and more memory and storage, more DRAM and more flash in order to make for a safe navigation of autonomous vehicles in the future. Internet of Things, another market opportunity is at its infancy, which is forecasted to rise over the years.
On the NAND side, the demand CAGR in the same timeframe is 40% to 45%. The group is focusing on technology. In DRAM, they are narrowing the technology gap and deploying more advanced technologies into production to ultimately narrow their cost gap.
In fiscal year 2018, over $6 billion of their total operating income is coming from the structural improvements that the group realized as a result of their progress on their strategic imperative since the 2016 timeframe.