Things were going well for memory-chip maker Micron (NASDAQ: MU) in 2021. Demand for PCs, servers, and all manner of gadgets was red hot, pushing up prices and sales volumes for memory chips. In Micron's fiscal 2021, which ended on Sept. 2 of that year, the company generated $27.7 billion of revenue, $5.9 billion of net income, and about $2.4 billion of free cash flow.
The situation was so good that Micron decided to initiate its first quarterly dividend since the late 1990s. The company declared a $0.10 per-share dividend in August 2021 and raised the dividend to $0.115 per share in mid-2022. The dividend was in addition to an active share-buyback program that has doled out $4.2 billion since fiscal 2020.
When Micron announced its first dividend in decades, management painted a picture of a transformed company. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra touted Micron's enhanced profitability and a rock-solid balance sheet, both of which were certainly the case in 2021. But 2022 has proven that the brutal cycles that have long plagued the memory-chip industry aren't going away.
Source Fool.com