Pricing power
doesn't gradually show
up. It erupts.
Same chips. Same factories. Triple the price.
↓ scroll to read
✦ The bottom line
Gross margin: 78.4% — up from 22.5% a year ago. Same products, same factories. The price NAND can charge changed.
↓ the brief below
✦ Teach me
Cents kept per dollar of sales
For every dollar a customer pays Sandisk, some pays for silicon, wafer fabrication, packaging, and shipping. The cents left over — before paying for R&D, marketing, and overhead — is the company's ~gross margin~.
In memory, this number is famously volatile. The market sets the price. The producer mostly takes it. When demand goes up faster than supply can grow, the price spikes.
Wall Street calls this
Gross margin
When this number *triples* in a year, the market is paying *whatever Sandisk asks.* That's pricing power — but it's the *cyclical* kind, not the *structural* kind.
Cents Sandisk keeps per dollar · Q3 FY26
78
¢
A year earlier — 22¢. Two things drove the shift: higher prices on NAND, and a mix shift toward higher-value data-center customers.
78¢ per dollar is extraordinary — but only meaningful in context. If every memory maker doubled their margin in the same year, this is the industry cycle lifting everyone. If Sandisk's margin jumped while peers stayed put, that's company-specific pricing power. The cleanest read is to compare against the closest publicly traded memory peer doing the same thing in the same window.
Sandisk vs. Micron · ~gross margin~, latest quarter
Cents kept per dollar of sales — most recent reported quarter
Sandisk
78.4¢
Micron
74¢
Both are at cycle peaks no memory company has reached before. Sandisk's pure-NAND mix is running even hotter than Micron's NAND+DRAM mix.