Micron Falls After Q4 Earnings Miss (MU)

Micron Technology MU closed up 1.49 percent Thursday afternoon. After reporting its fourth-quarter results, the company has fallen more than one percent in after hours trading. The company reported a Q4 EPS of $0.20 versus Street estimate of $0.24. Revenue came in at $2.8 billion versus the Street estimate of $2.7 billion. Sales were up 43 percent year-over-year. Micron also announced that its fourth-quarter EPS includes $1.31 per share related to Elpida and Rexchip. "Micron is executing well on multiple fronts with the successful integration of Elpida and ongoing steady development of advanced memory solutions, including our hybrid memory cube that began sampling with key customers this quarter and our second generation family of PCIe enterprise SSD's which recently qualified at a major OEM," Micron CEO Mark Durcan said in a company release. "Our product portfolio and systems solutions position us well to compete in the current favorable market environment." Over the past few months, analysts have had a bullish view of Micron's future. Wedbush is among the analysts that have raised their Price Targets on the stock. Their support has been tied directly to Micron's impeccable (if not surprising) increase. Shares of the chip manufacturer have soared more than 173 percent this year alone. Micron and SanDisk SNDK were particularly appealing to investors after SK Hynix HXSCL encountered a fire at one of its fabrication plants in China. On October 8 Micron announced that it had appointed Tom Snodgrass as VP of System Solutions. "We are excited to have Tom join the management team at Micron," Micron President Mark Adams said in a company release. "Given his strong industry experience, he will bring a unique perspective to our systems-level focus serving the enterprise market." Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report. Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ