What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.
This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.
Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out?
Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.
Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.
Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?
Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.
Sounds to me like they are using the tried and true method of selling equipment to the people rushing for gold