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Chipper chipmaker Micron shows off boosted bottom line – gee, thanks, Elpida

Colllaborating with Chipzilla on stacked silicon beauty

Analysis Memory chipmaker Micron Technology – still riding high on the announcement that its on-package memory will bolster Intel's "Knights Landing" processor – has announced what appear to be cheery results today.

Its fiscal 2014 quarter revenues were $3.98bn, 3 per cent lower than the second quarter of fiscal 2014 but a whopping 72 per cent higher than a year ago. It's not as a astounding as it seems, though - quite a bit of it can be chalked up to the revenue boost coming from Elpida Memory buy. Micron bought the Japanese DRAM-maker last year to help it achieve econmoies of scale.

Net income was a pleasing $806m compared to just $43m a year ago, and $731m in the second 2014 quarter, meaning a 10.3 per cent sequential rise. The three per cent sequential revenue decline was attributed mostly to NAND products.

Stifel Nicolaus MD Aaron Rakers said Micron generated $867m in NAND revenue in the May quarter, vs $901m in the prior quarter.

Micron's own-branded SSD revenue was 20 per cent of the flash revenue – a 60 per cent plus growth rate from the second quarter.

Its DRAM revenue was $1.857bn, vs. $1.835bn in the prior quarter and $924m in the year-ago quarter. The company saw strong server DRAM bit shipments, driven by data centre and enterprise demand.

Micron said demand for PC DRAM was more better than initially expected, due to enterprise PC refreshes, and there were some supply constraints.

The company has a TLC (triple layer cell) flash roadmap, TLC offering lower cost/bit than 2-bits per cell MLC flash, but with a shorter working life. It expects to have component samples of 16nm TLC flash around the end of the year, and consumer/retail client SSDS using that NAND in the second quarter of 2015.

It did not comment on its 3D NAND schedule but thinks 3D NAND won't have a material impact on the industry until the second half of 2015. ®

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