Kioxia Holdings told investors on Friday that net profit for the April to December period should reach about ¥3.56T, roughly $22.7B and around 24 times the year-earlier figure. Revenue is forecast at about ¥6.75T, roughly five times higher and a record for the nine months.
The interim numbers carry the same shape. For the six months to September the company booked revenue of about ¥4.25T and net profit of about ¥2.2T, which is 37 times the prior-year level. For the October to December quarter alone it is guiding to about ¥1.36T of profit.
The driver is not consumer demand. Smartphone and PC orders remain sluggish, and the forecast rests on data centre storage, where NAND flash has become the scarce component as AI training and inference clusters consume capacity faster than fabs add it.
Kioxia’s guidance also implies the curve steepens rather than flattens. Management said it expects growth to accelerate further into the January to March quarter, a striking claim for a commodity market that has historically punished anyone who assumed the top of the cycle was still ahead.
Profitability of that scale changes what the supplier can do with its cash. A company earning ¥1.36T in a quarter can fund new tool orders, buy back shares or pay down debt without choosing between them, and it can commit to supply agreements that competitors cannot match.
The risk sits in the same place it always does for memory. All of the industry’s producers are now earning enough to build, and capacity added in 2027 and 2028 will decide whether this forecast reads as a peak or a plateau.
