TechFlow news, according to TechFlow Research, Bernstein recently released the third report in its memory LTA series, suggesting that market concerns that LTAs might become "worthless paper" again may be biased. The new generation of LTAs adopts a back-end weighted margin structure, where customer default costs increase as the contract progresses, with core protection value concentrated in the latter half of the contract, coinciding exactly with the industry downturn cycle.
The report points out that customers signing LTAs in this round are mainly hyperscale cloud vendors and AI infrastructure providers, with fulfillment capabilities significantly stronger than historical solar and industrial customers.
In terms of stocks, Bernstein assigns Outperform ratings to four stocks: SanDisk, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron, with KIOXIA being the only Underperform stock. Among them, SanDisk is the most favored, believing the NAND catch-up logic has not been fully priced in.
There is divergence within the firm regarding NAND judgments: the Asia team worries about the impact of China capacity, while the US team believes AI inference is boosting NAND demand.
