Surging use of cloud-based data centers is sending revenue skyward for Micron Technology Inc., where sales surged 91% for the fiscal fourth quarter and 64% for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31.

And the surge in sales is still in an early stage, Micron president and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says.

Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO,
Micron Technology Inc.

Micron manufactures data computing and storage equipment that its customers use to build and operate data computing and storage centers to support business operations. Its technology is also used in building and operating applications in smartphones and digital graphics in online gaming and other products.

Fiscal Q4 revenue nearly doubled year over year to more than $6 billion; for the full fiscal year, revenue rose by more than half to more than $20 billion. Micron doesn’t break out e-commerce sales, but customers on its main website, Micron.com, can click to request a quote on any product and interact with a sales rep, or click the logo of an authorized distributor—such as Arrow Electronics or Avnet—to land on a Buy page for the desired product.

Micron, No. 60 in the B2B E-Commerce 300, also operates the e-commerce site Crucial.com for selling data memory and storage products for desktop and laptop computers to businesses, government agencies, schools and individual consumers. For the online gaming industry, it operates Ballistixgaming.com, where it provides information on data memory and related products that it sells through such e-commerce sites as Newegg.com, Amazon.com and Microcenter.com as well as Crucial.com.

Going forward, Micron expects its market to grow even faster as its customers develop new ways to use technologies like artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a term used to describe software that learns from the data it compiles to improve on its own such functions as recommending products or sources of products.

“New technologies like artificial intelligence will change the world in ways we can barely imagine today,” Mehrotra said on a conference call with stock analysts yesterday, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha. “Fast data access and high-performance data analytics will be at the heart of those transformations, making memory and storage core to the data-centric world that is taking shape in front of our eyes.”

Micron, he added, is on course to “accelerate” the development of its technology and product development to take advantage of such data trends. “Fiscal 2017 was a record year for us, but I am confident that the best is yet to come for Micron,” Mehrotra said.

For the fiscal fourth quarter ended Aug. 31, 2017, Micron reported:

• Net sales of $6.138 billion, up 90.8% from $3.217 billion a year earlier;
• Gross profit of $3.112 billion, up more than fivefold from $579 million, resulting in a profit margin of 50.7%, up from 18.0%;
• Net income of $2.368 billion, compared with a net loss of $170 million. The wide swing from net loss to net income occurred as Micron managed to slightly reduce its operating expenses even is its net sales surged.

For the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2017, Micron reported:

• Net sales of $20.322 billion, up 63.9% from $12.399 billion the prior year;
• Gross profit of $8.436 billion, up more than threefold from $2.505 billion, resulting in a profit margin of 41.5%, up from 20.2%;
• Net income of $5.089 billion, compared with a net loss of $276 million.

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