GF Securities Says NAND Prices May Stabilize Later This Year. What This Means for Sandisk Stock.

Chinese financial services firm GF Securities has cautioned that NAND prices will stabilize by the end of the year. For NAND king SanDisk (SNDK), this is particularly relevant as analyst Jeff Pu said, "We maintain our high‑teen QoQ NAND price expectation for 3Q26 but expect softening in 4Q26 to low single‑digit QoQ, pressured by weaker mobile demand and elevated mobile/PC inventories. Hyperscaler NAND inventory remains healthy at ~14 weeks (vs. ~15‑week normal), but the softer pricing outlook could slow pull‑ins."

This follows almost one-and-a-half years of strong NAND price growth, as AI drove a significant rise in enterprise SSD demand for training datasets, inference workloads, and model updates, among other use cases.

Founded in 1988 with the current Micron (MU) CEO Sanjay Mehrotra on its founding team, SanDisk is one of the world's leading flash memory companies and a pioneer in NAND storage technology. The company designs and manufactures NAND flash memory, solid-state drives (SSDs), embedded storage, removable memory cards, USB flash drives, and enterprise storage solutions for consumer electronics, personal computers, smartphones, automotive systems, and AI data centers.

Valued at a market cap of $254.5 billion, SNDK stock has rallied by 643.2% on a YTD basis.

So, can this potential rationalization in NAND prices affect the broader thesis around SanDisk? Not really, and here's why.

In an earlier analysis, I had made the case as to why SanDisk — being the only pure-play NAND player in the market — has a competitive advantage in the space. With a market share of 11%, it may be behind the memory giants of Samsung, SK Hynix (SKHY), and Micron (MU) in terms of market share now. Yet, SanDisk remains well-positioned to capture a market that is projected to reach about $96.1 billion by 2030.

How? Well, the company's Investor Day provided a glimpse into its strategic vision. The New Business Model, or NBM, will play a crucial part here. NBM replaces the old habit of renegotiating NAND pricing every quarter with multi-year supply contracts. SanDisk has signed NBMs with eight customers — three of them US hyperscalers — covering roughly half of fiscal 2027 bit output and about two-thirds of fiscal 2028 output. The average contract length runs past four years, and the longest stretches to five. Total contract value across those eight customers stands at $93.9 billion, with $91.1 billion still to be delivered, and SanDisk has backstopped the arrangement with $16.5 billion in financial guarantees from third-party institutions.