Micron jumps on upgrade; SanDisk gets hit

Shares of Micron Technology MU jumped 9% Tuesday after getting an upbeat review from Barclays Capital which upped the stock’s rating to overweight from equal weight. Micron was the top gainer on the SP 500 at last check.

Micron, which makes memory chips, is seen taking a hit from the slump in personal computer sales, as a result of a weak consumer market and the impact of the Thailand flood disaster on the hard disk drive market.

But Barclays analysts said the situation is bound to change soon, arguing, “Considering extremely cheap valuation and our expectation for DRAM pricing to trough in the first quarter of 2012 and move higher into the second quarter and beyond, we expect outperformance as vision to pent-up PC demand and hard disk drive normalization develops in the second half of 2012.”

On the other hand, another memory chipmaker SanDisk Corp. SNDK got a downbeat review from another broker.

Goldman Sachs cut its rating on the stock to neutral from buy, citing the “significant risk of industry oversupply in NAND flash in the first quarter of 2012, which could accelerate near-term price declines.”

“While we continue to view SanDisk as a structural winner, we see greater near-term trading risks with the stock trading near fair value,” analyst James Schneider wrote.

SanDisk was down 2.4% at $48.02.

- Ben Pimentel