SanDisk's Profit Surges But Guidance Disappoints — Where Does Memory Go From Here?

After the close on August 5th Eastern time, memory leaders SanDisk and Western Digital both reported earnings, and both prints were strong on the surface. SanDisk's quarterly revenue came in well above expectations, up nearly 4x year-over-year, and the company simultaneously announced a $14 billion share buyback program. The catch is that guidance for the next fiscal quarter came in soft, leaving sentiment somewhat split — the headline results were impressive, but the forward outlook didn't quite keep pace. Western Digital's numbers looked more consistently solid, with revenue of $3.75 billion, up 44% year-over-year. The more telling signal, though, comes from a different corner of the sector. Japan's Kioxia had previously announced a buyback program of up to ¥800 billion, alongside an explicit target of returning 50% of total shareholder returns — making it the first major memory maker globally to actually follow through on a large-scale buyback commitment. Combined with a framework from Nomura's July 28th research note, this paints a fairly clear picture: after Korea's KOSPI worked through a period of tightening liquidity and forced deleveraging, the market's driving force appears to be shifting — from a prior "leverage-driven bull run" toward a "buyback-driven bull run," where the support for share prices increasingly comes from corporate capital return decisions rather than external capital inflows. If that same logic extends to the memory sector, this rally might not just be a simple price recovery — it could reflect a more durable structural shift driven by how these companies choose to deploy capital. Is this move in memory chips a bounce, or a genuine reversal? Among SanDisk, Western Digital, and Kioxia, which one do you think is best positioned to validate this "buyback bull" thesis first? Flexibly allocate across core U.S. tech equities and diversified RWA portfolios on Bitget — achieve efficient cross-asset allocation and precision risk hedging: https://www.bitget.com/promotion/futures-rwa