Sandisk - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Executive Summary

• Q3 2025 revenue was $1.70B, down 10% q/q and 1% y/y, with non-GAAP EPS at $(0.30), while GAAP EPS reflected a $(13.33) loss driven by a $1.83B goodwill impairment; management pointed to oversupply and high single-digit ASP declines as key headwinds.
• The quarter was above prior guidance on revenue and at the high end for non-GAAP EPS; segment mix showed Client down 10% q/q, Cloud down 21% q/q, and Consumer down 5% q/q.
• Q4 2025 guidance: revenue $1.75–$1.85B, non-GAAP gross margin 25.5–27.0%, non-GAAP OpEx $395–$405M, non-GAAP EPS $(0.10)–$0.15, with ASPs expected up mid- to high-single digits and bit shipments flat.
• Catalysts noted: announced price increases at the start of Q4, strong BiCS 8 ramp (target ~10% of bits in Q4), and expanding enterprise SSD qualifications (TLC for compute; QLC for high-capacity storage), supporting a return to pricing discipline and margin recovery.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Revenue and EPS landed at the high end of guidance; cash and cash equivalents rose to $1.5B, reflecting operational discipline and liquidity improvement.
  • Technology execution: successful BiCS 8 ramp across product lines, with 2-terabit QLC die qualifying for 128TB/256TB enterprise SSDs; client SSDs qualified with multiple global PC OEMs.
  • Strategic pricing actions: company commenced price increases in Q4 and extended fab underutilization to rebalance supply/demand and support sustainable pricing.

• What Went Wrong

  • ASPs fell high single digits vs. expectation for mid-single-digit declines; Cloud revenue dropped 21% q/q, underscoring pricing and demand digestion in enterprise SSDs.
  • GAAP loss driven by a $1.83B non-cash goodwill impairment, compressing GAAP profitability and highlighting market-cap-based impairment triggers post separation.
  • Underutilization and fab start-up costs weighed on margins (Q3 non-GAAP GM would have been 25.8% absent $24M underutilization and $29M start-up costs); similar headwinds expected to persist in Q4.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hi there. Good day and welcome to the Sandisk Technologies Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today, we have David Goeckeler, CEO; Luis Visoso, CFO; and Ivan Donaldson, Investor Relations VP. All participants will be in listen-only mode, and should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over. Please go ahead.

Ivan Donaldson (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you very much for joining us today. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on management's current assumptions and expectations, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include expectations for our technology and product portfolio, our business plans and performance, market trends and opportunities, and our future financial results. We assume no obligation to update these statements. Please refer to our most recent financial report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the SEC for more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. We will also make references to non-GAAP financial measures today. Reconciliations between the non-GAAP and comparable GAAP financial measures are included in written materials posted in the Investor Relations section of our website.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Good afternoon and welcome to Sandisk's third quarter earnings call. To start this call, I want to thank the Sandisk team for enabling a smooth transition to a standalone company and for delivering a strong quarter. As discussed during our analyst day, our goal at Sandisk is to create value for our customers and shareholders, and in doing so, reaffirm our leadership in the NAND market. We are leveraging our strengths in innovation, scale, agility, and resilience, and remain disciplined in managing the business to build sustainable, profitable, and long-term growth. The strategy is working as intended, even amid ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. We believe that we are well positioned to capture the significant opportunity in front of us. We estimate that the NAND industry is poised for robust long-term growth, with demand expected to approach $100 billion by the end of the decade.

We expect growth to be driven by the exponential expansion of data, fueled in part by the deployment of artificial intelligence in cloud and edge applications, as well as refresh cycles in PCs and mobile devices. In data center, we continue to see strong capital investments and the emergence of new AI-driven workloads, which are fueling use cases for enterprise SSDs and expanding NAND's addressable market. In parallel, we have made structural changes to how we operate, increasing our focus on capital discipline and making a concentrated effort to drive higher returns on invested capital. Moving on to the third quarter results, we are pleased with our performance as we delivered revenue and EPS at the high end of our guidance ranges. For the quarter, we generated $1.7 billion in revenue, down 10% sequentially and down 1% year over year.

Non-GAAP EPS was a loss of $0.30 per share, while cash and cash equivalents increased from $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion. Luis will dive deeper into our third quarter results in a few minutes. The key indicator I want to call out is pricing. For the quarter, ASPs were down high single digits, reflecting continued oversupply in the market. This was higher than our mid-single digit decline expectation that we shared at our Analyst Day. To address this, we are extending our fab underutilization actions until supply and demand are balanced, and we see a sustainable recovery in pricing. At the beginning of the fourth quarter, we announced and began implementing price increases for our customers.

These price increases align with the expectation that we outlined during our analyst day, where we detailed our plan to reduce wafer production to align supply with demand and enable a sustainable level of pricing. Let's now move to technology and key business highlights. We continue to lead with innovation across all our markets, and nowhere is that more evident than with the successful ramp of BiCS 8, our latest generation of NAND technology. We expect BiCS 8 to be integrated across a broad range of product lines and represent 10% of our bits shipments in the fourth quarter. Our TLC products are being qualified by customers for high-performance mobile and compute applications, while our 2 Tb QLC die is in qualification with top cloud service providers for use in 128 TB and 256 TB capacity SSDs. These advancements are enabling better performance and improved energy efficiency.

In client, we see three structural drivers of PC replacement. This includes the Windows 10 end-of-life, a post-pandemic PC refresh, and the emergence of AI-enabled PCs. As we begin mass production of our BiCS 8 client SSDs, we completed qualifications with several key global PC OEMs, with more expected this quarter. We are also extending our leadership in automotive innovation, highlighted by our nomination as a Ford Supplier of the Year. We ship the industry's first UFS 4.1 samples for autonomous driving, where performance, reliability, and power efficiency are critical. Development is underway with key partners, and early samples are being used in the next-generation EV platforms and autonomous robotics. We expect to complete qualification in the coming months, paving the way for broader adoption in the next-generation automotive compute platforms, including advanced driver assistance systems and robotics, beginning in the second half of calendar year 2026.

In gaming, our latest SSD product has been exceptionally well received, winning multiple Editors' Choice Awards from top PC and gaming publications globally. This quarter, we will also begin shipping our first PCIe Gen 5 and Gen 6 BiCS 8-enabled client SSDs, delivering power, efficiency, and performance for AI and gaming systems. In consumer, we continue to lead the market with innovative products that define performance and reliability. We recently introduced several products, including our latest portable SSD and a new USB dual drive, each reinforcing our leadership in high-performance storage. In cards, the launch of our professional-grade memory card fills a critical gap in our portfolio and strengthens our position in the ever-growing content creation segment. Another key achievement for our consumer business is the launch of our next-generation microSD Express card, featuring a co-branded 256 GB card developed in partnership with Nintendo for the highly anticipated Switch 2.

This officially licensed product has been in development through close collaboration with Nintendo to ensure it delivers the next-level speed and performance the new console requires. I am proud of the recognition our consumer products continue to receive, including the Red Dot Design Award across all consumer storage categories, and the Best of Show Honor for a high-performance storage solution for our latest portable SSD at the NAB TV Tech 2025. These distinctions reflect the strength of our innovation engine and the exceptional work of our engineering and industrial design teams. In data center, we continue to see capital investments in the rapid growth of AI-driven workloads, which are expanding the use cases for enterprise SSDs and broadening NAND's addressable market.

Analysts estimate cloud CapEx from the major hyperscale providers grew over 50% to approximately $240 billion in calendar year 2024, and that momentum is expected to continue into 2025, reaching approximately $330 billion, a 40% increase. Given this opportunity, we continue to increase our bit allocation to enterprise SSD applications, representing 12% of our bits this quarter, up from 8% in the same quarter of the prior year. We expect to continue to make progress as we qualify our BiCS 8 products, with cloud customers leveraging QLC and Gen 5 and Gen 6 PCIe solutions. In summary, we continue to innovate to meet and exceed customer needs, reinforcing our performance and power efficiency advantage in the NAND market.

At the China Flash Memory Summit, customers highlighted our leadership position, setting our best-in-class performance-to-power profile. We were honored with the Product Innovation Award, a strong validation of our system-level execution and continued investment in innovation. Years of focused R&D have positioned us at the forefront of the market, and we are proud to be driving the next wave of advancement in flash memory. With that, I'll turn the call over to Luis to dive deeper into our financial performance and guidance. Luis?

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Thank you, David. Let me start by providing additional details on the third quarter. Revenue was $1,695 million, down 10% sequentially and 1% year over year, and above our guidance range of $1,550 million-$1,650 million. Sequentially, bits shipments were down low single digits, while ASP was down high single digits. Client revenue was $927 million, down 10% sequentially. Consumer was $571 million, down 5% quarter-to-quarter, and cloud was $197 million, down 21% sequentially. Lower ASPs impacted revenue across all our segments, particularly the cloud. Non-GAAP gross margin for the third quarter was 22.7%, within our guidance range of 21.5%-23%, as we continue to drive efficiency in our supply chain. During the quarter, our non-GAAP gross margin included headwinds of $24 million in underutilization charges and $29 million in fab startup costs. Excluding these charges, our non-GAAP gross margin would have been 25.8%.

Operating expenses were $383 million, better than our guidance range of $395 million-$405 million. Our performance reflects meaningful progress in identifying cost-saving opportunities, even as we continue to invest in innovation. Non-GAAP EPS was a loss of $0.30 per share, at the high end of our guidance range of a loss between $0.45 and $0.30 per share. We closed the quarter with 145 million shares outstanding. Our cash and cash equivalents increased from $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion. Our third quarter GAAP financials include $44 million in stock-based compensation, which is included in our cost of goods sold and operating expenses, and $9 million in business operation costs. This quarter, we evaluated our goodwill for potential impairment following a quantitative test in accordance with accounting standards and the engagement of valuation specialists. We concluded that the goodwill balance was impaired and recorded a non-cash impairment charge of $1,830 million.

As a result, our quarter-end goodwill balance was reduced to $5 billion. As we look ahead for the fourth quarter, we remain committed to a disciplined approach as we carefully manage both operating and capital expenditures, ensuring that our supply aligns with demand and implementing price increases to support a sustainable business model. Our key assumption in our guidance is that the current tariffs remain unchanged throughout the quarter. At present, there are no tariffs on our products except for shipments from China to the U.S., which have tariffs of 27.5%. For perspective, approximately 20% of our products ship to the United States, and over 95% of that revenue is sourced from countries other than China. We're working with our customers and closely monitoring the global supply chain environment while leveraging our agility to ensure continued stable sourcing plans.

We expect revenue for the fourth quarter of $1,750- million$1,850 million. Sequentially, this assumes bits shipments to be flat and ASP to be up mid to high single digits. While we're preparing for customers to be cautious given the uncertain macro environment, there are positive signs, including strengthening of transactional markets and encouraging customer engagements. We expect demand to strengthen throughout the year. As David mentioned, we expect client growth driven by the Windows 10 end-of-life, post-pandemic PC refresh cycle, and emergence of AI-enabled PCs and recovery in the mobile market. We continue to see content growth as new features and form factors spur demand. In cloud, customers digested inventories, yet fundamentals are strong as they continue to invest in infrastructure for AI.

We expect non-GAAP gross margin to be between 25.5% and 27%, which includes $55 million-$65 million in underutilization charges and approximately $50 million in fab startup costs. These costs are only partially offset by cost savings. We expect non-GAAP operating expenses to be between $395 million-$405 million, non-GAAP interest and other income and expense to be between $45 million-$50 million, and non-GAAP taxes to be between $22 million-$25 million. As a result, we expect non-GAAP EPS to be between a loss of $0.10 per share and a profit of $0.15 per share based on 146 million shares outstanding. Looking forward to fiscal 2026, we're planning on bits growth in line with the market. We expect balance to supply and demand with increases in average selling prices.

Our forecasted gross capital expenditures will be above our through cycle target model of mid-teens percentage of revenue from our BiCS 8 investment. This will follow two years of capital investments well below our through cycle target. As discussed at our investor day, we're beginning to move away from providing explicit guidance on cost per bit. Industry cost reductions from technology migrations are reducing, and we believe continually providing this metric is counterproductive to the value proposition of our technology, which is delivering increasing performance, power efficiency, and density. With that, let me turn the call back to David.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Luis. Let me wrap up, and then we'll open up for questions. We are pleased with the performance this quarter and our success in establishing Sandisk as a standalone company. These results reflect the strength of our execution and the alignment of our teams around clear strategic priorities. Looking ahead, we are confident that the combination of our industry-leading technology, return-focused investments, and improving industry fundamentals position us to deliver long-term results consistent with our target through cycle financial model. I'm proud of the team's accomplishments and excited about the future for our customers, employees, and shareholders.

With that, let's now open the call for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw from the question queue, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Joe Moore of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Joseph Moore (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you. Congrats on first quarter as a standalone company. Can you talk about the supply-demand a little bit? You said that you sort of took additional supply-side actions in the quarter. Give us some sense of magnitude there. Do you think that as we move into the second half, that we could be fully utilized and that the market would rebalance? How are you thinking about the longer-term view there?

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

I'll cover a little bit of that, and Luis can cover some of it. First of all, Joe, great to hear from you. Thanks for the question. We still see an undersupplied market through the end of next year. I think we're just going through the kind of ups and downs of a very dynamic market here. From my perspective, we talked about this back in December. We kind of went through a mid-cycle pause. I think we're coming out of that now. We talked about this at our analyst day that we expected pricing to start increasing in this quarter, and that's happening. I think, Joe, the underutilized—so we do see the market getting stronger as we go throughout the year. We see supply for this calendar year mid-single digits. We see demand kind of low double digits.

For next year, we see those pretty balanced in the mid to high teens, but coming off of a low supply base. We still see kind of a long-term undersupplied market, but of course, it's going to vary quarter to quarter. As far as our underutilization, I'll say a little bit about that. Luis can talk about it as well. He's very close to it. We just think it's a prudent move given the mid-cycle pause we came through, given where we're at on margins, just given what we're looking at. I think we're trying to balance out the market more directly now instead of going into big ups and downs, especially with the macro uncertainty risk. We thought it was the right move last quarter. I think that turned out to be a good call. It is something we look at every week, right?

We can make a very dynamic decision. We will stay very close to it, look at all the data points we have, and we will make the best decision for our shareholders of how to use the fab. Luis, you want to add to that?

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Maybe a few things to add, Joe, is, as David said, we're very optimistic on demand overall. We're seeing some unit growth, particularly on our client business. Particularly, the growth is coming from more content per unit as we look at this year and particularly as we forecast 2026. We're very optimistic there. As we've all seen, spending by the cloud providers is high as they continue to increase capacity, and we believe we benefit some of that as well. On the supply side and on the utilization, I think the most important point is what David said. We're tracking this weekly, monthly. What we want to do is make sure that we set up our structural capacity to the right level.

As we transition from BiCS 5 to BiCS 8, we're making sure we set up the right capacity so that we can be as close as possible to 100%. But it's important that we balance supply and demand. We have enough inventories to continue to serve the market, and we'll keep on tracking this very carefully.

Joseph Moore (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you. For my follow-up, I think enterprise SSD sort of had a little bit of a digestion window in March. It seems like it's getting better to me, and I just wanted to see how you guys are seeing those trends. Are you guys still confident in your ramp, kind of getting to the levels of market share that you've described in that space over time?

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Joe, I think the demand has been pretty consistent. There's been a lot of volatility in pricing, quite frankly, in that part of the market. Probably that's the most volatile part of the market on pricing. We see continued good demand. We're very, very optimistic about the roadmap. I think we've established ourselves well in that market. If I look FY 2024 to where we expect to end FY 2025, I see a tripling of that business from a revenue perspective, which lays a good foundation for us with qualifications and relationships with the right players. As we talked about our Analyst Day, we're moving into a period where we're going to have a new controller. We're going to have a new product in the storage side of that business. We have BiCS 8 coming, which is a great node for performance and power efficiency.

We think we've established the business well over the last couple of years. We've got qualifications in the right places. It's performing as expected. We feel like we're moving into a part of the portfolio where we're going to get stronger over the next couple of years, quarter by quarter as we move forward. I'm very happy and optimistic about that part of the business.

Joseph Moore (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from CJ Muse of Evercore. Please go ahead.

CJ Muse (Senior Analyst)

Thank you for taking the question. May I say congrats again, your first quarter out. I guess maybe if we could drill down—yeah, you're welcome—if we could drill down into gross margins. You talked about kind of taking utilization lower, yet you're still guiding up 355 bps sequentially. Could you help us kind of understand what the headwind is specifically in the Q2 and how we should think about that headwind kind of unwinding through the calendar year?

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. We feel good about the progress we're making on gross margin overall, CJ. I think the headwinds are the two that we called out in our preparing marks. One is this underutilization, right, of $55 million-$65 million, which really is the continuation of the decision we took earlier as we continue to play that out. That's a big one. I also called out the $50 million fab startup cost. We think that startup cost will be with us for a few more quarters, and then they should go away. That's kind of one-time cost that we have there, which will continue to impact us. Hopefully, we benefit from the higher ASP, which is helping our gross margin overall.

CJ Muse (Senior Analyst)

Perfect. Maybe a focus on enterprise SSD and CapEx. You talked about investment in BiCS 8. At the same time, we're seeing a concerted effort by some players in the industry pushing to 200 layer plus QLC and moving to Molly to really support kind of the AI enterprise SSD. I guess, where are you in kind of that transition? How do you go about bringing on kind of optimized capacity for the enterprise, yet at the same time limiting BiC growth? It seems to be in our form right now where we are in the cycle finance.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I mean, I think we manage that very closely. It depends on the enterprise SSD. I think you're mainly talking about the storage, high capacity, 60 TB going to 128, going to 256 over the next year. Those are QLC BiCS 8. I mean, that's all part of the ramp of what we'll do this coming year. This quarter will be like 10% BiCS 8, and FY 2026 will be 40%-50% BiCS 8. That's that ramp happening. I guess to say, how do we go about that? We go about that very carefully to make sure that we don't just do just what you said, which is oversupply the market with bits as we go to higher layer count and more density per wafer as we go through that transition.

We also structurally remove some capacity from the system as we go on the number of wafer starts to make sure we keep that in balance.

CJ Muse (Senior Analyst)

Thanks so much.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, CJ.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director and Technology Analyst)

Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Also, my congrats on the first quarter out of the gate. Kind of sticking with the gross margin, maybe taken a little bit of a different way, is that it looks like if I adjust for some of these underutilization and startup cost charges, that your cost on a per bit basis was maybe more or less flattish sequentially this last quarter. It looks like, based on the guidance, again, with those charges considered, it looks like you're assuming maybe the cost improves, right? Your cost structure declines maybe in the low to mid-single digit on a bit basis this next quarter. I guess my question is, how do we think about, as BiCS 8 matures, the cost down that you expect to see as we move out into the second half of the year and into 2026?

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I think we talked about this, Aaron. First of all, thanks for the congratulations. We feel good about it, our first quarter out. It's been a great two or three months here post-separation. It's gone quick. We talked about this in the script. We talked about our analyst day. We're going to start talking less about cost downs. I'll give you some context on that because I think it's important. First of all, I think the whole structure of the industry of driving cost downs, it's an important concept, mainly around expanding the TAM. I think in storage in general, having managed two different storage franchises, you drive the cost down, you expand the TAM. However, we talked about it. TAM's going to $100 billion. I think expanding the TAM is not really our issue as a company. It's making sure we have the right profitability to drive all the capital investment required to support this demand.

We're more focused on the technology differentiation we have. We feel very good about the R&D we do, performance, power, density, all these things we need. In an AI world, customers are really pushing us for more dense, higher IOPS-based enterprise SSD that requires an enormous amount of R&D investment. That's really where we want to put the focus. I'll also say the cost downs are, my observation over the last five years, they're just more—I don't want to say unpredictable. They're less consistent is the right way to say it. Some quarters used to be you'd get pretty consistent cost downs as you move nodes and you drove yields higher.

It just seems like over the last couple of years, they've been a lot of quarters up and down. It's hard to just put a number out there for them. They're also getting harder to get, quite frankly, as we get to these larger layer nodes, larger layer count nodes. You get more bits than you do cost downs, right? Just the way it works. That's really the third part is, I think for a long time, kind of the approach to the industry was drive a new node, get more cost downs. I think the last downturn showed that that was like bringing a gasoline can to a fire because you get way more bits than you get cost downs.

When you add that all up, we just want to focus on different parts of the business and kind of not talk so much about that. All that said, we will get some—obviously, we will get some cost downs out of BiCS 8, right? We are just not going to forecast them on a quarter-by-quarter basis. The way you are thinking about it is a reasonable way to think about it. I do not know a longer answer than you were looking for, but I appreciate you bearing with me. Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Rakers (Managing Director and Technology Analyst)

All good. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Karl Ackerman of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Karl Ackerman (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Yes. Thank you. I was hoping you could address the outlook for NAND bit shipments in the June quarter and if you still anticipate NAND bit volume to grow low double digits this calendar year. As you address that question, perhaps you can discuss the level of order visibility that you have across your various end markets.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. So for the June quarter, what we guided was flattish bits, right? Now, if we look further out, when we were together at analyst day, we said we expected growth to be high single digits in the July through December semester, back end of 2025. Frankly, there is nothing that we see that leads us to change that view. We continue to feel optimistic about the growth in the business, particularly in the industry. We talked about some of those drivers earlier in the call. We talked about client. We talked about PC. We talked about mobile. We talked about cloud. We continue to feel good about the long-term growth in the industry. For the June quarter specifically, it is what we guided. We guided bits to be flattish and ASP to be going up.

Karl Ackerman (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Visibility across the markets.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Visibility so far is, I mean, we talk to customers all the time, right? What we see across the market is good. There are pieces in all the transactional markets, and you guys have access to a lot of that data. We're seeing prices moving up. We see the business moving. We're making good progress across client and cloud. We feel good about where things are so far as we start in the quarter. That leads us to have confidence in the guide we're giving you.

Karl Ackerman (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Very helpful. I cede the floor. Thank you.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Karl.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Vijay Rakesh of Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Vijay Rakesh (Managing Director)

Yeah. Hi. Thanks, David. It's just a quick question on the cloud side. I saw it's growing almost 100% year on year, I guess. Can you talk to how many enterprise hyperscale customers you have? How you're approaching that market? What are the milestones that you expect to hit?

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. We have multiple hyperscale customers, and we're really starting to expand out the channel business, especially the kind of qualification we talked about with NVIDIA a couple of quarters ago. That's now starting to really blossom with a lot of customers, a more broader set. We feel good that we're playing at the biggest players. And then deeper into the ecosystem as AI pulls a lot of business in that part of the portfolio.

Vijay Rakesh (Managing Director)

Got it. I think when you look at the SSD segment, a lot of it is still shipping on TLC, but you're starting to see QLC SSD pick up. Can you talk to how that ramp is going? Where does SanDisk on that roadmap in terms of qualification or ramping up shipments on QLC? Thanks.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

We talked about that a little bit at our Analyst Day, and it's still very consistent with that. We have the compute-focused, TLC-based, very high-performance PCIe Gen 5 interface SSD that has been doing quite well at hyperscalers and throughout a broader set of customers. I think the number of qualifications there keeps increasing. We have the larger QLC-based storage-based enterprise SSDs, 60 TB, going to 128, then eventually 256 as we move through fiscal year 2026. That qualifications are going well there, but what we're really excited about is we have a new architecture coming out in the next couple of quarters that we call Stargate, new ASIC, clean sheet design, and then with BiCS 8 QLC. We just think that's going to be a dynamite project. We'll have it in customers' hands here soon, and we expect that to go very well.

We're very optimistic about the portfolio, about the progress we've made and what's coming from a roadmap perspective.

Vijay Rakesh (Managing Director)

All right. Thank you.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Steven Fox of Fox Research. Please go ahead.

Steven Fox (Founder and CEO)

Hi. Good afternoon. I had two questions if I could. First of all, I was curious about how we think about underutilization charges beyond this quarter, how quickly they sort of dissipate. Then just thinking about the full supply chain, you've mentioned that there's not a lot of direct exposure to tariffs at this point, and even it sounds like demand is holding up pretty well too. Is there any other bottlenecks that you're worried about with your customers where they're moving around supply chains or anything else that could either help you versus competition or maybe become a sort of a push-out going forward? Thank you.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I would say, first of all, underutilization, our overall strategy is we would rather operate at 100% capacity, right? We believe that this is a tactical thing we need to do, and I think it's the right thing to do at the right time. Over time, we need to get out of that, right? We want to have our structural capacity set up for the market that we're supporting, and that's how we want to operate. We'll be tracking this, as David said earlier, and we'll be adjusting over time. Our overall goal is to get 100% out of underutilization when we can, when supply and demand is balanced. On your second question, we're good on tariffs, right, as we said, right?

Only 20% of our products are shipped to the U.S., and 95% of those products do not have any tariffs because they are sourced from countries outside of China. We do not see a lot of other bottlenecks in our supply chain. The supply chain is run efficiently. We have, as you know, front-end comes 100% out of Japan from our JV, and we have several options on the back end, particularly Malaysia. We do have a JV in China which sources some of the countries as well. We feel that the supply chain is operating efficiently and supporting our products around the world.

Steven Fox (Founder and CEO)

Great. That's very helpful. Thank you.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Steven.

Operator (participant)

Once again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. Our next question comes from Nam Kim of Arete Research. Please go ahead.

Nam Hyung Kim (Senior Analyst)

Hi. Thank you. Thank you for taking my question. One more question on NAND pricing. Compared to a few months ago before tariff impact, the overall sentiment on price outlook seems becoming more conservative. You mentioned that you also meet high single ASP built into your guidance this quarter. Is this mainly driven by transactional market or across the board? If you give me any color on OEM market, that would be great. If I can add one more question, since your bits are all located in Japan, I just wonder how Japanese yen exchange rate against dollar impact your cost structure. Is there any framework to share with us for our modeling purposes? Thank you.

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. You want to go ahead?

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

No, no, Pico. All right. So just a little bit on pricing. I mean, we have a lot of visibility as a company, right? We have a big consumer franchise. We have a good-sized channel business. We sell to all the PC OEMs. We sell to all the hyperscalers and all the phone vendors. I think the turn in the market is across the board. We just see we've had conviction on this for a while. I think we were early in saying that we thought in the June quarter we were going to see price increases. That's what we put out in our analyst day. And we took actions to help drive that. But really, it was looking across this entire kaleidoscope of information we have and talking to customers and understanding all the technology roadmaps that gave us the conviction in that.

Of course, there's been a lot of macro issues, tariffs or whatever it happens to be that's been things for the market to digest along the way. When you still look at it, as I said, I think in the first question, we still see an undersupplied market through the end of calendar year 2026. That's kind of because that's how far out we forecast at this point or we feel like we have enough data on. We've had a lot of conviction that we're moving into a better market. What we went through in the last couple of quarters was just a mid-cycle correction. I think that that's playing out. I hope that helps on the pricing side. On the yen, I'll let Luis take that.

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. I mean, overall, our front-end is clearly exposed to the yen, and we're somewhere on whatever JPY 144 per dollar today. Now, something to be very careful here as you do your models is there are two types of costs, right? There are costs which are yen-denominated, which I would say is labor and a few other things. And there are other costs which are non-yen-denominated, even if they are coming from Japan. Think about equipment and CapEx and some of our materials which we're importing from other countries, or they are part of the global economy, and therefore they are dollar-based or they could be euro-based. Not necessarily all our cost that comes out of Japan is exposed to the yen in the same way. We obviously track this very carefully, and we make sure that we are prepared to that. We understand that piece.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Does that make sense?

Nam Hyung Kim (Senior Analyst)

Yeah. Thank you very much.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to David Goeckeler for any closing remarks.

David Goeckeler (Chairman and CEO)

All right. Thanks for joining us on our first conference call as SanDisk, our first earnings call. We appreciate your participation, all the great questions, and we look forward to talking to you throughout the quarter. Take care.

Luis Visoso (EVP and CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.