Barclays cut NetApp two days after revenue jumped 30%, calling the boom memory prices, not AI
NetApp beat and raised on October 12, then Barclays cut it on October 14, saying memory price inflation, not AI demand, is driving the boom. The next quarter decides who is right.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Two days after NetApp−3.85% — NetApp, down 3.85 percent today filed its best quarter in years, Barclays analyst Tim Long cut the stock to Equal Weight anyway, arguing the seven enterprise-hardware names in his coverage are up about 140% this year and trade near 21 times estimated 2027 earnings against a five-year average of about 15, with no meaningful enterprise AI inflection yet 2. The stock slumped with Dell and HPE on the news 3. An investor in the storage complex now has to pick a side, and the filed numbers do not make it easy.
The quarter behind the cut
NetApp's fiscal first quarter, reported October 12, brought $2.02 billion of revenue, up 30% year over year, after 12% and 4% in the two prior quarters 1. All-flash array revenue jumped 47% to $1.31 billion, product revenue rose 51% to $987 million, and the company signed 350 AI and data-lake deals 1. GAAP net income climbed 61% to $375 million, and CEO George Kurian raised the full-year guide 17% to $8.1 billion 1. Growth is accelerating, not decaying.
NetApp's growth accelerated to 30% just before the downgrade
- NetApp revenue growth, YoY %
- Estimate
Data
| NetApp revenue growth, YoY % | |
|---|---|
| Q3 FY26 | 4 |
| Q4 FY26 | 12 |
| Q1 FY27 | 30 |
| Q2 FY27 guide (estimate) | 23 |
What the numbers hide
The complication sits inside the beat. Kurian himself flagged a "challenging component cost environment": some of the all-flash surge traces to NAND price increases rather than unit growth, and gross margin, up to 70.6% from 70.1%, shows the price tailwind beating the procurement headwind this round 1. Free cash flow fell to $401 million from $620 million a year earlier as working capital absorbed the surge 1. That is exactly Long's case: growth inflated by memory prices that, in his words, should "normalize and potentially decline," shrinking the beats over the next two years 2. Barclays trimmed its Dell target to $574 from $603 on the same logic, crediting Dell's rally largely to price increases offsetting memory inflation 2.
Free cash flow fell to $401 million as the surge absorbed working capital
Data
| NetApp free cash flow, $B | |
|---|---|
| Q1 '24 | 0.57 |
| Q2 '24 | 0.3 |
| Q3 '24 | 0.06 |
| Q4 '24 | 0.34 |
| Q1 '25 | 0.64 |
| Q2 '25 | 0.62 |
| Q3 '25 | 0.08 |
| Q4 '25 | 0.27 |
| Q1 '26 | 0.9 |
| Q2 '26 | 0.4 |
The counterpoint and the tell
Kurian argues the demand is broader than AI, a modernization wave across databases, unstructured data and every customer segment, calling it "a clear, structural improvement" 1. The Peak:AIO acquisition, announced the same day, doubles down on that bet: a parallel-NFS metadata layer built for trillion-file GPU clusters 4.
The tell is next quarter's print, guided to $2.1 billion, up 23% 1. If growth holds as NAND prices soften, Kurian is right. If it stalls, the downgrade was the better guide.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
