Kioxia's stock price fell by 15% at one point, and the quarterly profit guidance was below expectations

Japanese NAND flash memory manufacturer Kioxia Holdings saw its stock price drop by 15% on Monday. The company provided a guidance for operating profit of 2 trillion yen (approximately 12.7 billion USD) for the December quarter last Friday, which is below the consensus expectation of analysts at 2.35 trillion yen and only slightly higher than the 1.99 trillion yen recorded in the September quarter. In previous quarters, Kioxia's operating profit surged due to the procurement of high-speed NAND storage by artificial intelligence data centers.

Kioxia attributed the slowdown in growth mainly to the timing of shipments rather than a weakening demand. Some orders originally scheduled for delivery this quarter were moved to the September quarter at the request of customers, while others were postponed to the March quarter next year due to an increase in the proportion of enterprise storage and longer production and delivery cycles. Chief Financial Officer Yoshihiko Kawamura stated in a conference call last week that the company expects to see a rapid recovery in growth in the March quarter, with demand from artificial intelligence data center operators remaining strong.

Kawamura also mentioned that the company's planned production capacity for next year is already sold out, and more than half of the production for the following year has also been allocated. Some major customers have begun negotiations for contracts covering 2029 and beyond. Kioxia competes with Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology, focusing primarily on NAND, while its South Korean counterparts also sell DRAM needed for artificial intelligence computing.