Company: Sandisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK)
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2026, after the market close
Call time: 1:30 p.m. Pacific, 4:30 p.m. Eastern
Format: Live webcast at investor.sandisk.com, with a replay afterwards
Period covered: First quarter of fiscal 2027, ending September 2026
Sandisk reports on Thursday, and the quarter itself is the least interesting part of it. Management already told the market what to expect back in August: revenue of $10.3 billion to $10.8 billion, gross margin of 83% to 85%, and adjusted earnings of $44 to $46 a share. The Street sits near the top of that range, at roughly $10.7 billion in sales and about $46 to $47 in earnings.
Sandisk has beaten consensus in each of its last four quarters, often by a wide margin. So a beat is the base case. What moves the stock is the December quarter guide.
A Year That Rewrote the Comparison
A year ago, in the same quarter, Sandisk booked about $2.3 billion in revenue at a gross margin below 30%. The fiscal fourth quarter that closed in June came in at $8.97 billion, up 51% from the quarter before, with adjusted earnings of $39.25 a share. If Thursday lands inside guidance, revenue will have roughly quintupled in twelve months.
That growth came almost entirely from price. NAND contract prices jumped more than 50% in the first quarter of 2026 and around 70% in the second, as hyperscalers bought enterprise SSDs for AI inference and storage faster than the industry could add capacity. Supply stayed tight. Sandisk got paid a lot more for every bit it shipped.
The Guide Has to Clear a Slower Price Curve
This is where Thursday gets harder. TrendForce expects overall NAND contract prices to rise 15% to 20% in the fourth quarter, with enterprise SSD contracts up 23% to 28%. Those are healthy numbers in any normal year. They are also a fraction of what the first half delivered, and consumer buyers in PCs and phones have started to push back.
Run the arithmetic. A December guide that implies sequential growth in line with those price gains puts revenue somewhere around $12 billion to $13 billion. Anything well short of that looks like the curve flattening faster than the market hoped. August showed what happens then. Sandisk beat on every line, guided a little light of an inflated consensus, and the shares fell about 7% after hours.
Contracts, Margins and the Buyback
The second thing to listen for is how much of the business is now locked in. Sandisk said in August that its new long-term agreements, which carry floor prices, would cover more than half of fiscal 2027 bits and about two thirds of fiscal 2028. It also said bits would stay on allocation beyond calendar 2027. Any new signed customer, or any detail on the floor pricing, matters more than a few cents of EPS.
Gross margin is the other tell. A memory maker running in the mid-80s is earning software economics on a commodity product. Holding that level into the December quarter would say pricing power is still with the supplier. A guide that drifts toward the high 70s would say it is starting to move back to the buyer.
Then there is capital return. Sandisk bought back $4.5 billion of stock in the June quarter and announced a fresh $14 billion authorization. How fast it spends that money says a lot about how management sees the shares at current prices.
A Stock That Already Gave Some Back
SNDK went into October up close to 500% for the year, then slid six sessions in a row to close at $1,394.83 on October 15, about 41% below its June 22 high of $2,354.39. Most of that was profit-taking ahead of the print, not news about the company. Options were pricing a move of around 11% either way.
The pullback lowers the bar a little. A clean beat, a guide above $12 billion and margins holding in the mid-80s would likely get rewarded this time. A soft guide with vague comments about consumer demand would not, however good the September quarter looks.
Thursday is a guidance call dressed up as an earnings report.