Will Micron beat earnings again on September 30?

Micron, the American company that makes memory chips for phones, computers, and AI data centers, has spent the past year beating its own forecasts by a wide margin. It reports its latest quarter on September 30, and Polymarket's contract on the result asks whether it will earn more than $32.22 a share, just above the top of its own forecast. Traders put the chance at about 93%.

Memory chips hold the data a computer is working on, and the AI boom has left the world short of them. Micron says it simply cannot make enough. As its chief business officer, Sumit Sadana, put it in June: “The shipment growth for bits is not determined by demand anymore. It's determined by the supply.” When supply is that tight, prices climb, and Micron's profit per share went from $3.03 a year ago to $25.11 in the quarter to May.

Every quarter, Micron tells investors what to expect. In June, it forecast about $31 of adjusted profit per share for the quarter that ended in August, give or take $1, and analysts expect about $31.16. To clear $32.22, Micron has to beat its own middle figure by $1.22, or about 4%.

That would be a small beat by Micron's recent standards. In the last three quarters, it forecast $3.75 and reported $4.78, forecast $8.42 and reported $12.20, then forecast $19.15 and reported $25.11. The smallest of those beats was 27.5%, about seven times what it needs now.

Those beats came from memory prices rising faster than Micron had planned for, and prices are still rising, just more slowly. The research firm TrendForce expected DRAM contract prices, the main type of memory Micron sells, to rise 13% to 18% between July and September, after they jumped 93% to 98% in the first three months of the year.

The contract is priced for a near-certainty, and we think that price is justified. Micron has earned the benefit of the doubt after repeatedly exceeding what it promised.