SanDisk Profit Tops View; Shares Up 6%

(RTTNews) - Flash-memory card maker SanDisk Corp. (SNDK), Wednesday reported a surge in profit for the second quarter, driven mainly by a jump in revenues and sharp rise in gross margins. Both earnings and revenues for the quarter came in ahead of analysts' estimates, sending SanDisk's shares up over six percent in extended trade on the Nasdaq.

Milpitas, California-based SanDisk's second-quarter profit rose to $262 million or $1.06 per share from $13 million or $0.05 per share last year.

On an adjusted basis, second-quarter earnings rose to $299 million or $1.21 per share from $51 million or $0.21 per share last year. On average, 25 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $0.93 per share for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

SanDisk revenues for the second quarter surged 43 percent to $1.48 billion from $1.03 billion last year. Analysts estimated revenues of $1.40 billion for the quarter.

Commenting on the quarterly results, SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said, "We delivered record second quarter results driven by increasing momentum across our business. We achieved solid revenue growth in our embedded solutions portfolio with many design wins ramping into production."

SanDisk's upbeat performance comes after some weak results for the industry last year. The company benefited from improved pricing for memory chip as demand for mobile devices continue to improve.

SanDisk makes removable cards, embedded flash products, USB flash drives and solid-state drives used in place of hard disk drives. Its products are used in mobile phones, consumer electronics, and other devices.

Gross margin, or percentage of sales left after deducting cost of production, significantly improved to 45.8 percent from 27.2 percent last year.

SNDK closed Wednesday's trading at $59.44, down 0.10%, on the Nasdaq. The stock, however, gained $3.91 or 6.58% in the after-hours trade.