#我的七夕交易分享 Recently, the performance of pure-play U.S. stocks such as SanDisk and Micron has clearly been stronger than that of SK hynix.
Although SK hynix is not a truly American company, its valuation has been constrained. While much of the leverage has now been washed out and volatility has also declined, its earnings are genuine, and so is market demand.
SanDisk’s rally this time is not isolated. Throughout July, the market had already carried out a brutal deleveraging and shakeout of the memory and even the broader semiconductor sector. This time, SanDisk has reshaped the market’s view of memory stocks. The company said long-term contracts can cover most of its future capacity, set a high long-term gross margin target, and its CFO also mentioned that excess cash would be returned to shareholders. What the market actually heard was not just a single piece of positive news, but that demand, prices, profits, and shareholder returns had all emerged together.
At this point, SK hynix’s position becomes relatively clear. It is one of the core suppliers of HBM, and in AI servers, the tightest components, apart from GPUs, are high-bandwidth memory. As NVIDIA, cloud providers, and AI training and inference clusters continue to expand, HBM order visibility will be stronger than that of ordinary memory. After SanDisk rose, capital naturally looked for companies in the same segment whose potential had not yet been fully reflected, and SK hynix is one such catch-up candidate.
U.S. stocks favor buybacks because, fundamentally, investors like companies to clearly account for how they use their money. Once a company earns money, it first invests in the businesses that need investment; if there is no higher-return destination for the rest, it uses the money to return it to shareholders.
Buybacks are more concrete than verbal optimism because they reduce the number of shares outstanding and boost earnings per share. They also amount to management acknowledging that the company’s cash flow is already strong enough. This is the key reason SanDisk rose so sharply this time.
Two figures in the Caixin news report are particularly solid. One is that the company expects to receive total contract value of $93.9 billion from eight customers over the contract period. The other is that the company expects a non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 80% from fiscal 2028 through fiscal 2030. This shows that the market was not buying merely the phrase “I want to conduct buybacks,” but rather longer-cycle revenue visibility and profit margins.
The announcement that evening also gave investors ample time to get in. In hindsight, it was an event-driven trading opportunity with an exceptionally attractive risk-reward profile.
The biggest problem in the memory industry in the past was that its cycles were too strong: once prices fell, profits quickly collapsed. SanDisk has now locked in part of its capacity and customer base through long-term agreements, so investors will revalue the company. When the CFO added that all excess cash was expected to be returned to shareholders, the meaning became even clearer.
The business needs to grow, profit margins need to be maintained, and cash also needs to return to shareholders. That is why U.S. stocks favor buybacks, especially buybacks supported by earnings, contracts, and cash flow. They are not merely intended to prop up the share price, but to tell the market that the company’s money will ultimately translate into value per share.$SNDK
Although SK hynix is not a truly American company, its valuation has been constrained. While much of the leverage has now been washed out and volatility has also declined, its earnings are genuine, and so is market demand.
SanDisk’s rally this time is not isolated. Throughout July, the market had already carried out a brutal deleveraging and shakeout of the memory and even the broader semiconductor sector. This time, SanDisk has reshaped the market’s view of memory stocks. The company said long-term contracts can cover most of its future capacity, set a high long-term gross margin target, and its CFO also mentioned that excess cash would be returned to shareholders. What the market actually heard was not just a single piece of positive news, but that demand, prices, profits, and shareholder returns had all emerged together.
At this point, SK hynix’s position becomes relatively clear. It is one of the core suppliers of HBM, and in AI servers, the tightest components, apart from GPUs, are high-bandwidth memory. As NVIDIA, cloud providers, and AI training and inference clusters continue to expand, HBM order visibility will be stronger than that of ordinary memory. After SanDisk rose, capital naturally looked for companies in the same segment whose potential had not yet been fully reflected, and SK hynix is one such catch-up candidate.
U.S. stocks favor buybacks because, fundamentally, investors like companies to clearly account for how they use their money. Once a company earns money, it first invests in the businesses that need investment; if there is no higher-return destination for the rest, it uses the money to return it to shareholders.
Buybacks are more concrete than verbal optimism because they reduce the number of shares outstanding and boost earnings per share. They also amount to management acknowledging that the company’s cash flow is already strong enough. This is the key reason SanDisk rose so sharply this time.
Two figures in the Caixin news report are particularly solid. One is that the company expects to receive total contract value of $93.9 billion from eight customers over the contract period. The other is that the company expects a non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 80% from fiscal 2028 through fiscal 2030. This shows that the market was not buying merely the phrase “I want to conduct buybacks,” but rather longer-cycle revenue visibility and profit margins.
The announcement that evening also gave investors ample time to get in. In hindsight, it was an event-driven trading opportunity with an exceptionally attractive risk-reward profile.
The biggest problem in the memory industry in the past was that its cycles were too strong: once prices fell, profits quickly collapsed. SanDisk has now locked in part of its capacity and customer base through long-term agreements, so investors will revalue the company. When the CFO added that all excess cash was expected to be returned to shareholders, the meaning became even clearer.
The business needs to grow, profit margins need to be maintained, and cash also needs to return to shareholders. That is why U.S. stocks favor buybacks, especially buybacks supported by earnings, contracts, and cash flow. They are not merely intended to prop up the share price, but to tell the market that the company’s money will ultimately translate into value per share.$SNDK
