Sandisk (SNDK -4.98%) closed Monday at $1,551.99. Over the past year, the flash-memory specialist's stock has traded as low as $85.12 -- and as high as $2,354.39.
A price that has multiplied like that has investors wondering about a stock split.
To be clear, Sandisk hasn't announced one, and management hasn't publicly raised the idea. But the mechanics are worth laying out anyway, because most of what investors assume a split would change, it wouldn't.
What, specifically, would one do?
Image source: The Motley Fool.
A low share count
The four-figure price tag tells you nothing about how big or how expensive Sandisk is. Mainly, it reflects how few shares exist.
Western Digital spun the company off in February 2025, giving its investors one Sandisk share for every three Western Digital shares they owned. And the count has hardly moved. Sandisk ended fiscal 2025 with about 146 million shares outstanding, closed fiscal 2026 (the year ended July 3, 2026) with about 146 million, and has about 146 million today, even as the growth stock multiplied.
All of the move was in the price.
Worth noting: the one lever the board has pulled points the other way. In August, Sandisk added $14 billion to its buyback authorization, taking the total available to $15.5 billion. Buybacks reduce the share count -- the opposite of what a split would do.
Compare that with Micron Technology (MU -5.25%). The fellow memory maker is worth about $1.1 trillion (more than four times Sandisk's $227 billion), but its stock trades near $925, because that value is spread across about 1.1 billion shares.
And the two stocks' valuations are nearly identical. Sandisk trades at about 22 times earnings. Micron does, too.
A share price, on its own, tells investors almost nothing. In ten years covering tech stocks, I've rarely seen a better example.
Nothing fundamental would change
Say Sandisk announced a 10-for-1 split tomorrow. Anyone holding one share worth about $1,552 would instead hold 10 shares worth about $155 each. Nothing else fundamental would happen.
Fiscal 2026 revenue of $20.25 billion, up 175% year over year on higher memory prices and a shift toward higher-value customers, wouldn't change.
Neither would net income, which totaled $11.4 billion for the year ($6.9 billion of that in the fiscal fourth quarter alone), or the company's market value or any investor's percentage ownership. And because earnings per share and the stock price divide by the same 10, the price-to-earnings multiple ends up exactly where it started. Put another way, a split creates more shares, not more business.
For the market-value-weighted benchmarks, index membership doesn't hinge on the share price, either. Sandisk joined the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.48%) last November without splitting, and later this month it enters the S&P 100 the same way. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced the Sept. 21 addition earlier this month.
One index does care
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.29%) is the one major index where Sandisk's share price would get in the way of the company joining it. The Dow weights its members by share price instead of market value.
In its own index announcements, S&P Dow Jones Indices points out that lower-priced stocks have minimal impact on the average. A $1,552 stock would have the opposite problem, carrying an outsized weight from day one.
The sequence has played out before.
Nvidia completed a 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024. Five months later, S&P Dow Jones Indices added the stock to the Dow. A split couldn't guarantee Sandisk a spot, but it would eliminate the one obstacle the company controls.
NASDAQ: SNDK
Key Data Points
Who would notice a split?
The people most likely to notice are options traders. One options contract is for 100 shares of the underlying stock, so at Monday's close, a single Sandisk contract represents about $155,000 worth of stock.
Selling a covered call (an income strategy that requires owning the shares) means owning all 100 beforehand. A 10-for-1 split would reduce that block to about $15,500.
Of course, someone who just wants to own the stock may not care. Brokerages such as Fidelity sell fractional shares, and at Fidelity, a slice costs as little as $1. No one needs $1,552 in hand to own a piece of Sandisk.
In the end, a split is packaging. If Sandisk announces one at some point, it could dominate a day's headlines, and nothing about the business would move -- not revenue, not profits, not the value of anyone's stake.
Whether the stock is worth owning at about 22 times earnings arguably comes down to memory prices and data center demand. I'd want to see Sandisk hold its margins through a quarter of falling memory prices before buying. A split wouldn't change that.
