Weekend Update - W2622
About this episode
The episode discusses the recent trillion-dollar valuation of a memory company and the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry.
The Trillion-Dollar Bet That the Cycle Is Dead The market just handed a memory company a trillion-dollar valuation at roughly a hundred times trailing free cash flow, on a yield under one percent.¹² Strip the letters AI off that sentence and it is a bet that the most violently cyclical business in technology has quietly stopped being cyclical. On Wednesday’s main show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent an hour on the opposite problem — how you get to a two-trillion-dollar valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow at all. That was the SpaceX S-1.³ This week the market answered the mirror image for Micron. It looked at the cash that actually exists, and it priced that cash as if it can never fall again. Here is the part the screens are not showing you. As recently as fiscal 2023, Micron lost almost six billion dollars in a single year — and its gross margin went negative, which is the polite way of saying it sold memory for less than it cost to make.⁴ That was not 1998. That was two years ago. The cycle before it: fourteen billion in net income in 2018, gone to a fraction of that by 2020.⁵ Boom, glut, collapse, repeat. The most reliable pattern in semiconductors, and Micron…
People in this episode
Hosts: Hunt, Jason, Mike
Topics covered
- market valuation
- memory companies
- semiconductor cycles
- free cash flow
- investment strategies
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Micron, SpaceX
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