SanDisk Reports Tonight After a $550 Drop From Peak

SNDK is a pure-play NAND flash storage company reporting its latest quarterly results this evening, arriving at $1,330 after losing 22% over the past month and nearly a third of its value from the $1,887 September peak.

The stock bounced 5.5% over the past week, recovering some ground against peers STX and WDC, which gained 0.15% and 4.7% respectively over the same period. That partial recovery came after the stock fell another 5.3% on October 29. Despite the severity of the drawdown, the borrow market shows no sign of bearish conviction from the short side. Availability runs at 4,144%, meaning more than 41 shares remain loanable for every one currently borrowed. Cost to borrow has dropped 46% over the past week to just 0.16%, a negligible rate. Short interest itself is 3.4% of the free float, near a year-low, and down roughly 9% over the past month. Short sellers have been reducing positions into a falling stock, not adding to them. Options positioning has also lost its defensive edge. The put/call ratio is 1.18, fractionally below its 20-day average of 1.20, meaning hedging demand has not picked up despite the price decline.

The fundamental debate is high-stakes. Bulls point to a structural shift in NAND storage: AI inference workloads are demanding performance-critical storage rather than commodity capacity, and SanDisk's vertical integration with Kioxia through the BiCS8 and BiCS10 roadmaps supports bit output growth from the same wafer base. Datacenter revenue reportedly rose 437% in FY26, reaching 38% of company bits in the fourth quarter. The New Business Model agreements covering roughly 65% of FY28 production, with minimum contracted revenue of $93.9 billion and $16.5 billion of guarantees, give management the basis to target mid-to-high-teens revenue growth and roughly 80% gross margins through FY30. Bears counter that the NAND market remains structurally oversupplied, Edge still accounts for around 60% of 2025 sales, and the Flash Ventures joint-venture model leaves SanDisk carrying roughly half of fixed costs regardless of volumes. Any slowdown in AI infrastructure spending or acceleration in industry capacity additions could compress ASPs and margins quickly. Cantor Fitzgerald cut its target from $2,900 to $2,200 just four days ago while keeping an Overweight rating, a signal that even the most bullish corner of the Street is marking down its near-term expectations. The consensus mean target of $2,144 implies about 61% upside from the current price, but that figure predates the latest leg of the selloff.

The print tests a straightforward but unusually wide question: whether the Datacenter revenue acceleration and contracted-revenue backlog can offset NAND market softness convincingly enough to justify a stock that, even after a 22% drawdown, carries a price/book of 2.6 and a forward PE of 5.2.