SNDK Climbs Back to $1,454 as the Buyback, Split Watch, and $1,700 Target Backstop the NAND Bid

The Bounce Holds

SNDK is +5.79% over 21h to $1,454, retracing most of Tuesday's 6.17% drawdown to $1,452.02 without any new windfall-tax headline out of Seoul. The proximate trigger for Tuesday's flush was a Facebook post by South Korea's presidential chief of staff Kim Yong-beom proposing a special tax on AI companies to fund a national dividend, which hit every memory name with non-trivial AI exposure. With no follow-on tape and Korean memory leadership re-bidding overnight, the sector flush is being treated as a one-day scare rather than a regime change. The same $148 million of 24h perp volume on this HIP-3 market underlines that the bid has not left.

Why the Structural Bid Won't Quit

Sandisk is the cleanest pure-play on a NAND market where 2026 manufacturing capacity is essentially sold out and Q2 average selling prices are projected to rise 70-75%. Bernstein on May 4 raised its target to $1,700 from $1,250 and pushed FY27 EPS to $200.47, a 60% jump above the prior consensus. The fiscal Q3 print already showed revenue at $5.95 billion (up 250% year-over-year) and non-GAAP gross margin expanding 5,570 basis points to 78.4%, the kind of operating leverage that does not show up outside a genuine pricing supercycle. Samsung and SK Hynix have been scaling back NAND output and prioritizing DRAM, leaving Sandisk and Kioxia to absorb the AI demand pull through their Yokkaichi joint venture, now extended through 2034.

Capital Return and Split Watch

On May 11 Sandisk paired the pricing story with capital return, authorizing a $6 billion buyback on top of roughly $4.5 billion in annual free cash flow and a zero-debt balance sheet as of the April 3 quarter end. That removes a chunk of the cyclicality discount the market has historically slapped on memory names. The other May 13 angle is mechanical: with the share count untouched since the Western Digital spin and the price north of $1,450, SNDK has become a natural stock-split candidate in the wake of KLA's 10-for-1 announcement. Splits do not change fundamentals, but they widen the retail buyer base and tighten the spread — both of which matter for a $1,400+ nominal that gets clipped on every macro hiccup.

The Levels

The number to watch is Monday's $1,547.56 record close; a clean reclaim re-engages Bernstein's $1,700 target, with Susquehanna's $2,000 sitting above that as the upside outlier. To the downside, the May 12 intraday range of $1,394-$1,551 frames the no-man's-land — losing $1,394 forces the conversation back to whether Korea-style policy risk is going to keep capping memory multiples through Q2 prints. Until then, the path of least resistance is the one the analyst tape is pricing: FY27 EPS estimates that have climbed from roughly $10 in September 2025 to $200+ today, and a NAND book that has nowhere else to ship its bits.