Micron Shares Decline on Weak Forecast

Micron Technology (MU) posted a quarterly profit late Monday with the company citing an increase in average selling prices and gains in unit sales volume of its memory products.

Micron said that for its third quarter of fiscal 2010, which ended June 3, 2010, net income was $939 million, or 92 cents per share, compared to last year's net loss of $301 million, or 37 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected net income of 43 cents per share, but the numbers may not be comparable as the company also reported that the results for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 include $488 million in purchase accounting gains relating to the Numonyx acquisition.

Micron more than doubled its revenue from last year, reporting net sales of $2.29 billion in the recent third quarter, $1.11 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2009. Top line results beat analyst estimates of $2.12 billion.

The company's gross margin improved from 35% in the second quarter to 40% in the third quarter, primarily due to an overall increase in average selling prices and the benefit for price adjustments from suppliers of NAND products. Analysts had expected margins of 34.3%.

Still, the company's shares are skidding 6% in Tuesday's premarket trading after the company disappointed investors when it said on the conference call it expected dynamic random access memory (DRAM) bit growth for the fourth quarter to be flat to up slightly, quarter over quarter. Analysts have expected double-digit growth.