Kioxia’s net profit jumped about 46-fold to ¥842.2B ($5.3B) in the April-to-June quarter, from ¥18.3B a year earlier, as surging NAND prices turned Japan’s flash memory maker into a cash machine.
Operating profit for the quarter hit ¥1.27T, with revenue of ¥1.767T ($11B), up 415 percent year on year and 76 percent quarter on quarter. Average selling prices rose 70 percent from the prior quarter.
For July to September, Kioxia forecasts operating profit of ¥1.89T ($11.78B), ahead of the ¥1.95T average analyst estimate. CFO Yoshihiko Kawamura said the run is only beginning: “We are still in the early stages, and I believe the real growth is yet to come.”
Management is returning cash to shareholders with a buyback of up to ¥800B ($5B), roughly 170 percent of its planned annual capex budget, plus a three-for-one stock split effective October 1. The scale of the payout underscores how profitable the memory upcycle has become after years of losses.
The company is also locking in demand through long-term agreements aimed at covering about half of shipment volumes. Executive officer Toshiaki Fujikawa said most contracts run through fiscal 2027 or 2028, with some customers pushing for even longer commitments.
The results extend a string of blowout memory earnings from Samsung and SK Hynix, all driven by AI’s appetite for storage and the industry’s shift of wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for accelerators.
