Micron Loses $135 Million (102 Million Euro) in Q4 of FY 2011

The NAND Flash storage market may not exactly be as bad off as that of DRAM, but it doesn't seem to be doing too great either, as evident from how Micron, a big supplier of such chips, incurred a loss during the latest fiscal quarter.

Micron Technology has just completed the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2011 so, naturally, it provided an update on its finances.

Unfortunately, not everything is rosy in its camp, since the revenue figure did not manage to go up at all and, even more relevantly, an operating loss was recorded.

Back in the third quarter, despite this not being the best year for the IT industry, Micron still managed a $75 million profit when the DRAM and NAND sales were tallied.

Going by today's exchange rates, that approximately equals 56.74 million Euro.

Unfortunately, that figure was almost half as small as the operating loss that Micron was constrained to report this once.

While the total revenue stayed flat on-quarter, at $2.14 billion (1.61 billion Euro, give or take), the operating loss settled at $135 million. That is about 102 Million Euro.

Micron would have been able to rejoice at a positive evolution if it had only NAND Flash for sale (the NAND revenue grew 11% sequentially).

This is not the case, and it was DRAM sales that slid down 12%, the average selling prices continuously falling.

There is, at least, a silver lining in the fact that the whole fiscal year 2011 was still a reasonably productive one, with a net income of $167 million (126.36 million Euro).

Finally, revenue grew from $8.48 billion in FY 2010 (6.41 billion Euro) to $8.78 billion (6.64 billion Euro).

Nevertheless, the above mentioned net income was still abysmally low compared to 2010's $1.85 billion (1.39 billion Euro).