Sandisk Corp. was basking in the warmth of rising share prices Thursday, after announcing a huge jump in profits this quarter, driven mainly by strong demand from mobile customers.
On Wednesday, Sandisk reported first-quarter net income of $234.7 million, or 99 cents per share, compared with a $208 million loss in the same period last year.
The firm also noted that its revenue for the first quarter had risen 65% to $1.1 billion.
Eli Harari, Sandisk’s founder, chairman and CEO said the results were “considerably better than we had expected,” and lay much credit at the door of the mobile market.
According to the transcripts on Seeking Alpha, Harrari said the mobile end of the market continued to see strong adopting of Sandisk’s iNAND embedded storage products, as well as mobile cards.
“Mobile has now grown to half of our product revenues, compares to virtually nothing five years ago,” Harari said.
The CEO also went on to note that MicroSD “has become the de facto card in mobile phones.”
The market place, he said, “has bifurcated into low capacity one and two gigabyte MircoSD cards for low end phones and high capacity for 32 gigabyte MircoSD card for high end Smartphone and we believe we hold strong leadership positions in both segments.”
Harrari did note, however, that the mobile market for Flash was still in its early days.
“Just to remind you, mobile apps hardly existed and Smartphones were hardly a household word just two years ago,” he reminded analysts.
“The iPod along with other similar products is expected to drive demand for Flash memory 64 gigabyte in higher capacities, where the DISK demand comes in the form of embedded storage or removable cards. We are now well positioned in both categories,” he surmised.
In terms of how Harrari sees tablets and e-books impacting the NAND flash industry in 2010, the CEO was upbeat.
“We view that as a very, very important new platform that drives the demand for flash because it is really designed to be very thin, very long battery life and therefore really relies on attributes of flash for storage,” he explained.
“The iPod is driving 64 gigabyte. We fully expect that the competition will be really driving at the 64 gigabyte and opening up to 128 and 256 gigabyte. This is very, very positive development for the NAND industry no matter who serves it,” he concluded.
