Micron stock rises after analyst calls it a 'favored' name for 2018

Shares of Micron Technology Inc. rose 1% in premarket trading Wednesday after analysts at Susquehanna Financial Group named the company one of their "favored" memory picks for 2018. "Cloud demand is expected to remain a key secular trend in '18 with ripple effects across the entire storage/memory supply chain," wrote the analysts, led by Mehdi Hosseini. "Data growth, and rapid migration of workloads from on-prem environments to public cloud, is not expected to abate, and we favor Micron and Western Digital Corp. as our top component names expected to benefit from cloud demand." Hosseini added that Facebook Inc. has announced plans to nearly double its capital expenditures for next year and Amazon.com continues to bring AWS to new regions. He's also upbeat about memory demand given increased interest in smartphone content. Micron shares have gained 91% so far in 2017, while WDC's stock is up 20%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has risen 36%, and the S&P 500 has gained 19%.

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