Micron Stock (MU): The Memory Cycle in 17 Years of Filings

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-11-07

Micron stock trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker MU. It is the share of Micron Technology of Boise, Idaho, which makes DRAM, the working memory inside servers, PCs and phones, and NAND, the memory that stores data.

Memory is a commodity with a long build time. Factories take years to add, so prices swing hard when demand runs ahead of supply or falls behind it, and Micron’s profits swing with them.

A quote page shows today’s P/E. It does not show you the swing, which is the whole story of this stock. We rebuilt it from Micron’s own filings and the price record.

Micron in seven numbers

Price is the November 6, 2026 close. Earnings, equity and revenue come from the 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 3, 2026, filed October 9. Shares are from that filing’s cover, dated October 2.

The price had risen 141.8% in 2026 to November 6, against 28.8% for the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) and 7.8% for the S&P 500. The record close was $1,213.56 on June 25, 2026; at $690.00 the stock was 43.1% below it. On November 5 alone it fell 17.46%, then rose 5.12% the next day.

How it works: two chips and one price cycle

Two products carry almost all of it. In fiscal 2026, DRAM brought in $100.68 billion, 75.6% of revenue, and NAND $31.79 billion, 23.9%. Everything else came to $0.72 billion.

Micron now reports four business units by customer, and in the September 2026 quarter the cloud memory unit brought in $16.28 billion and the core data center unit $18.00 billion, against $13.11 billion for mobile and client devices and $6.82 billion for automotive and embedded, according to the results release.

Price does more work than volume. A memory factory costs roughly the same to run whether chips sell high or low. When prices rise, most of the extra money falls straight to gross profit. When they fall, the costs stay and margins can go below zero, as they did for four quarters in 2023.

It spends heavily to keep up. Micron’s cash flow statement shows $30.71 billion spent on property, plant and equipment in fiscal 2026 ($27.37 billion net, by the company’s own measure in the release). That spending is how new supply arrives, which is also how the next price fall can start.

The original data: 68 quarters of Micron gross margin

Gross margin, every quarter since fiscal 2010. From Micron’s XBRL filings we took revenue and gross profit for all 68 quarters from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2026. Where a 10-K gives only the year, the fourth quarter is the year minus the first nine months. Micron’s fiscal year ends on the Thursday closest to August 31, so “fiscal 2026” ran to September 3, 2026.

There is no official definition of a memory cycle, so we used our own: a turn wherever margin moved 20 points or more from its last extreme. That rule gives three full cycles. A 15-point rule would add a fourth (a 35.8% peak in late 2014 and a 17.2% low in mid-2016), and a 25-point rule would drop the 2021 low and peak, so treat the count as a product of the rule:

The 2019-2021 low was a double bottom: 26.6% in the quarter to November 2019 and 26.4% in the quarter to March 2021. The 2023 bust was the deepest in the series, with revenue down to $3.69 billion in one quarter. Three and a half years later the quarter to September 2026 brought in $54.23 billion.

The price turned before the margins, mostly. For each turn we took the lowest (or highest) close from 18 months before to 6 months after the quarter ended, our own window. In all three lows the share price made its bottom first: 4.9 months before the 2012 margin low, 11.6 months before the 2021 one (that price low was the March 2020 crash), and 5.2 months before the 2023 one, on September 26, 2022 at $48.88.

At the peaks the highest close came 1.6 months before the 2010 margin peak and 3.1 months before the 2018 one. In 2021-22 the order flipped: margins sat at 46-47% for four quarters, and the price high of $97.36 came on January 14, 2022, 4.4 months after the quarter we mark as the peak. A wider window changes two of the six answers, three cycles are a small sample, and this is a description of them, not a timing rule.

DRAM and NAND: Micron’s revenue by technology since fiscal 2015

Revenue by technology since fiscal 2015. The split comes from the product table in each 10-K; where a year appears in more than one filing we used the latest.

Micron has changed the grouping twice. Up to fiscal 2017, chips that pack DRAM and NAND together (multi-chip packages) were counted as NAND. From the fiscal 2020 10-K, those packages and SSDs are split into DRAM and NAND by component value, and fiscal 2018 and 2019 were restated: fiscal 2018 DRAM went from $21.23 billion to $22.63 billion. So 2015-2017 show less DRAM than the current method would. For 2015 and 2016 we also added Micron’s “non-trade” sales (mostly NAND, plus some 3D XPoint, sold to Intel at about cost) to NAND.

On the current method (fiscal 2018 on), DRAM’s share ranged from 67.7% (fiscal 2020) to 76.5% (fiscal 2025); on the older one it was as low as 58.1% in fiscal 2016. The bad years hit both lines: fiscal 2023 revenue was $15.54 billion, about half of fiscal 2022’s $30.76 billion.

Download the data: quarterly gross margin, revenue by technology with year-end P/E and earnings-day moves. Reuse is fine with a credit and a link back, under the site license.

A worked example: Micron’s P/E from 4.6x at the peak to 136.5x

Take each fiscal year’s diluted EPS and divide the closing price on the last day of that fiscal year by it.

1. In fiscal 2018, at the 61% margin peak, MU looked cheap at 4.6 times earnings. Earnings per share then fell from $11.51 to $2.37 in two years.
2. In fiscal 2024, with margins still climbing out of the hole, the P/E was 136.5x. Earnings per share then rose from $0.70 to $74.33 in two years.
3. Today’s 9.3x uses fiscal 2026 profit, the best year in the series. The ratio says what investors pay for that year, not what the next one holds. Our P/E ratio page covers the arithmetic, and the earnings per share page explains the figure underneath it.

Price-to-book is steadier for a company like this, because equity moves less than one year’s profit. At 5.64x it compares the $690.00 price with $122.30 of equity per share. Our price-to-book page shows how that ratio is built.

Micron after the bell: 89 results reports since 2004

Micron files its results with an 8-K after the market closes. We matched every quarterly results filing since 2004 (89 of them, all accepted after the close) to the next day’s close-to-close move. We read each 8-K and left out two Item 2.02 filings that were not quarterly results.

• The median move was 5.26%, against 1.68% across the other 5,473 trading days.
• 46 of the 89 (51.7%) moved 5% or more, against 9.8% of ordinary days; 17 moved 10% or more.
• Direction: 37 were up, 41.6%, against a 50.6% up-rate on other days. A gap that size is within what chance produces over 89 tries (two-sided binomial p = 0.091).
• The largest were +15.74% on June 25, 2026 and −18.15% on June 26, 2015.
• Since 2021, 24 releases had a median move of 4.58%, and 10 were up.

When it fails: a moving P/E and a 98.2% fall

The low P/E is a moving target. At a cyclical peak the “E” is at its highest, so the ratio looks lowest exactly when profits have the most room to fall, as fiscal 2018 showed.

Drawdowns have been severe. The worst ran from a close of $96.56 on July 14, 2000 to $1.69 on November 20, 2008, a 98.2% fall, and the stock did not close above that 2000 high again until January 14, 2022, 21.5 years later.

More recently it fell 49.8% from January to September 2022 and 57.8% from June 2024 to April 2025. From its June 25, 2026 record to the November 5, 2026 close of $656.39 it fell 45.9%. Our drawdown page explains the measure.

It swings more than the market. That shows in the calendar years: −22.8% in 2018, +69.5% in 2019, −46.3% in 2022, +70.7% in 2023 and +239.1% in 2025. The volatility and beta pages explain how traders measure that.

These numbers age fast. The next quarterly report replaces every row of the first table, which is why each figure carries its date.

Questions people ask

What does Micron make?

Memory chips. DRAM, the short-term working memory used in data-center servers, PCs and phones, was 75.6% of fiscal 2026 revenue. NAND flash, which stores data in solid-state drives and phones, was 23.9%.

Why is Micron’s P/E so low?

At $690.00 and fiscal 2026 diluted EPS of $74.33 the P/E is 9.3x. Memory profits rise and fall with chip prices, so the market tends to pay a low multiple on peak earnings. In past cycles the ratio was lowest at the top of the profit swing, 4.6x at the end of fiscal 2018.

Does Micron pay a dividend?

Yes, a small one. The board declared $0.15 a share on September 30, 2026, payable October 29. That is $0.60 a year at this rate and a 0.09% yield at $690.00. Our dividend yield page covers the arithmetic.

What is Micron’s market cap?

$780.7 billion at the November 6, 2026 close, using the 1,131,423,212 shares on the cover of its latest 10-K. Our market cap page explains the measure.

When does Micron report earnings?

About four times a year, after the close, roughly three to four weeks after each fiscal quarter ends. The fiscal first quarter ends in late November or early December, so that report usually comes in late December, though it has slipped to early January before (January 7, 2021).

Related

For the ratios behind this page, see P/E ratio, price-to-book and free cash flow. If you hold chip stocks through a fund, sector funds covers what that concentration means. For another chip stock, see what $1,000 put into Nvidia became.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.