It has been a great 12 months for Sandisk (SNDK) and its investors. SNDK stock is up more than 1,100% in the past 52 weeks on strong optimism that the company’s NAND flash storage products and other computing memory devices will continue to be in high demand. Sandisk was the best-performing stock in all of the S&P 500 ($SPX) in 2025, and is continuing its strong performance with a 150% year-to-date (YTD) gain.
But a short report from Citron Research threatens to let some air out of Sandisk’s sails. Citron said Sandisk is vulnerable because it believes that NAND flash memory drive demand is cyclical rather than structural, and the company is ripe for a pullback.
“The market is pricing Sandisk like it’s [Nvidia (NVDA)],” Citron said in a social media post. “There’s one problem: Nvidia has a moat. Sandisk sells a commodity. We’ve seen this movie before [in] 2008, 2012, 2018. It’s never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak.”
Citron also suggests that Samsung is the better computing storage stock. “Samsung has a 30-year history of choosing market share over margins,” Citron said. “They wait for pure-plays like SanDisk to get comfortable at 50% gross margins, then flip the switch.”
Is Citron right that Sandisk has run too high, too quickly?
Sandisk has an interesting history. The company was purchased by data storage company Western Digital (WDC) in 2016. But in 2023, Western Digital announced it would spin off Sandisk again into a new company that included Sandisk’s and Western Digital’s flash products, solid-state drives (SSDs), memory cards, and USB drives.
That has been a winning formula for Sandisk, which is based in Milpitas, California. With its dramatic rise in share price, the company now has a market capitalization of $83.4 billion.
Its products can be used in phones, laptops, cameras, and game systems. Sandisk also has a fast-growing edge computing segment, which supplies storage for smart devices that create data, such as cameras, drones, and motor vehicles.
Even with those gains in stock price, however, Sandisk is surprisingly affordable. SNDK stock’s forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 16 times compares favorably with Samsung. So, you’re paying a slight premium for Sandisk shares — but the stock’s performance over the last 12 months more than justifies the cost.
