Key Points
NetApp's fiscal Q4 results beat analyst estimates by wide margins.
The stock finally surpassed its all-time high from the dot-com era.
The company helps enterprises clean up messy data for AI training and inference, and that's a tremendously valuable service nowadays.
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NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) investors are having a nice Friday. The massive-scale data storage specialist's stock jumped as much as 35.3% around 10:25 a.m. ET. The stock backed down a bit from that extreme gain, but was still up 26% at 12:45 p.m. ET. Yep, that's what a strong earnings report can do, especially when paired with bullish guidance targets.
Another dot-com peak bites the dust
With this surge to more than $170 per share, NetApp's stock finally eclipsed a long-standing record price of $148.63, set in the fall of 2000.
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NetApp crushed analyst targets in fiscal Q4 2026. Earnings rose 26% year-over-year to $2.43 per diluted share. Revenue increased 13% to $1.95 billion. The consensus Street view had called for earnings near $2.27 per share on sales in the neighborhood of $1.87 billion.
And that's not even the best part. Management's guidance targets for the next quarter and fiscal year 2027 consistently landed well above current analyst projections.
Image source: Getty Images.
Messy data is NetApp's best friend
As expected, NetApp CEO George Kurian celebrated the ongoing AI boom. The company helps enterprise customers manage huge arrays of raw, disorganized data.
Real-world data is often messy, especially if it includes input by real, imperfect, wonderful humans. AI systems prefer working with clean, structured datasets. A quick round of NetApp's data cleanup and organization makes a significant difference to the speed and quality of AI training or inference.
"As enterprise AI adoption scales, the primary challenge is not compute, but activating large volumes of unstructured data," Kurian said in the earnings call. "We are encouraged by the robust demand signals we are seeing and are confident in our ability to maintain this momentum, as reflected in our FY27 outlook."
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Anders Bylund has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends NetApp. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
