In the course of this meeting, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company and the industry. We wish to caution you that such statements are predictions and that actual events or results may differ materially. We refer you to the documents the company files on a consolidated basis from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically the company's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. These documents contain and identify important factors that could cause the actual results for the company on a consolidated basis to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. These certain factors can be found in the investor relations section of Micron's website. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements.
We are under no duty to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of the presentation to conform these statements to actual results.
Good morning, and welcome to the 2014 meeting of Micron shareholders. Before I move on with the formal part of the presentation and the business meeting, I'd like to introduce our directors individually and ask them to stand as I announce their name. Bob Bailey, former Chairman and CEO of PMC-Sierra. Rich Beyer, former Chairman and CEO of Freescale Semiconductor. Pat Byrne, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, and Chief Technical Officer of Danaher Corporation. Mark Durcan, the CEO of our company. Warren East, former CEO of ARM Holdings. Mercedes Johnson, former Senior VP and CFO of Avago Technologies Limited and Lam Research. Larry Mondry, CEO of Flexi Compras. Thank you all. Now with that, maybe we can move on to the formal business of the meeting.
I have been advised, I've received an affidavit stating that the notice of this meeting and a proxy statement have been given to all shareholders of record as of November 25th, 2013. The Inspector of Election, James Alden of Phoenix Advisory Partners, has signed the Oath of Inspector Election. The Inspector of Election has reported to me that we have present in person or by proxy, not less than 85% of the outstanding shares entitled to vote at this meeting, which does constitute a quorum. I therefore declare this meeting duly convened. We will vote by ballot today as we have in the past. If you have turned in a valid proxy and do not intend to change your vote today, it is not necessary for you to vote again. We will vote your proxy.
If you did not turn in a proxy or wish to change your vote, please raise your hand now and we will distribute a ballot for you to vote. Is there anybody that needs ballots? I see some out there. Okay. I think everybody's been covered. The proxy statement describes the items to be voted on today. The first item of business is the election of directors. Bob Bailey, Rich Beyer, Pat Byrne, Mark Durcan, Warren East, Mercedes Johnson, Larry Mondry, and I have been nominated to serve until the next annual meeting or until our successors are duly elected and qualified. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, please mark your ballots. The second item of business is the approval of the amended and restated 2007 Equity Incentive Plan. Is there any discussion on that item? Okay, seeing none, again, please mark your ballots.
The third item of business is the approval of the amended and restated 2004 Equity Incentive Plan. Is there any discussion on this item? Okay. Seeing none, please mark your ballots on that item. The fourth item of business is the ratification of the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the independent registered public accounting firm of the company for fiscal 2014. Is there any discussion on this item? Okay, there being none, please mark your ballots accordingly. The fifth item of business is to approve a non-binding resolution to approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in our proxy statement. Is there any discussion on this item? Okay, seeing none, please mark your ballots. The company has not received notice of any other matter to be presented and voted upon at this meeting. Therefore, this concludes the voting for this meeting.
There being no other formal business to be presented, I now declare the meeting adjourned. I'd now like to introduce Mark Durcan, the company's CEO, who will provide you with a business overview and some discussion around strategy. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Bob. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for coming. As Bob mentioned, I'd like to share a few thoughts on 2013 and what we were able to accomplish during that year and some thoughts on the path forward. Before I jump in, I'd like to make a few additional introductions, starting with our lead partner from PwC, Larry Westall. Larry, can you stand up, please? There he is. Now some of our corporate Vice Presidents, starting over here on the left, Steve Thorsen, Vice President, Worldwide Sales. Jay Hawkins, Vice President, Consumer Products. Brian Shirley, Vice President, Worldwide Manufacturing. Pat Otte, Vice President, Human Relations. Mike Sadler, Vice President, Corporate Development. Ed Mahoney, Vice President, Information Systems. John Schreck, our Vice President, DRAM Design. Dean Klein, Vice President, Memory Systems. Mike Rayfield, Vice President, Wireless Business Unit. Tom Eby, Vice President, Embedded Business Unit.
Scott DeBoer, Vice President, Process Research and Development. Ron Foster, our CFO and Vice President of Finance. Kipp Bedard, Vice President, Investor Relations. Brian Shirley, Vice President, DRAM Solutions Group. Joel Poppen, Vice President, Legal Affairs and General Counsel. I'm getting blocked here. Excuse me, Mark Adams, our President, Chief Operating Officer. Additionally, I have two area VPs that are new to the company that I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce you to. Tom Snodgrass, Vice President, System Solutions, and Brian Angell, Vice President, Advanced Controller Development. Thank you all, gentlemen. Without further ado, let me share a few thoughts on 2013. It was certainly a busy and productive year for us.
When you look back in aggregate at what we accomplished, from a merger and acquisition and capacity perspective during the calendar year, we successfully divested ourselves of two and a half older 8-inch wafer manufacturing facilities and brought into the Micron capacity network two and a half state-of-the-art 300-millimeter manufacturing facilities. At the beginning of the year, we restructured our relationship with Nanya. They exited the joint development program we had with them for DRAM development, and we added half a very large fab for DRAM manufacturing in Taiwan. As we moved through the year, obviously, we got to the end of the fiscal year, and we brought Elpida into the Micron family. Along with the Elpida fab in Hiroshima, we were able to acquire 88% and 100% of the capacity of a foundry they had significant ownership of in Taiwan.
We also had a number of 8-inch fabs that were no longer necessary for Micron for the products that we want to produce on a go-forward basis. Those included an imaging fab in Avezzano, Italy, which we sold to LFoundry in the middle of the year, and one in Israel that was building NOR manufacturing that could be consolidated into one fab in Singapore. As we got to the end of the calendar year, we were able to restructure our relationship with Intel, so they took over operations of that fab.
Along the way, we also introduced a lot of great products, including two new system-level products, a Hybrid Memory Cube, which is really state-of-the-art for delivering high-performance computing and networking solutions, as well as a numerous family of new SSDs, including a very advanced MLC or multi-level cell PCIe solid-state drive in the middle of the year. Finally, when we got to September, we celebrated our 35th anniversary. All in all, we feel pretty good about some of the things we accomplished from a big-picture perspective in terms of repositioning the company going forward. When I get to the end of my discussion here, Mark Adams is going to come up and tell you a lot more about what we did internally to improve our efficiency, our product offerings, and the way we're running the company. Financially, we have good results to report.
Hopefully, the shareholders can take pride in the fact that we were able to execute a roughly $2 billion turnaround in terms of what happened on the net income line at Micron. In 2012, over $1 billion in losses, in 2013, over $1 billion in gains. We were able to continue that momentum as we moved into FY 2014 with a very strong performance in our first fiscal quarter that continued growth in strong cash flow as well as the operating income line. The balance sheet is strong. We grew cash and short-term investments to over $3 billion, and we grew shareholder equity by over a billion and a half dollars to in excess of $8 billion. Overall, we feel pretty good about the position the company's in from a financial footing, and it provides a strong foundation from which to grow moving forward.
The environment we operate in has changed rapidly over the last number of years, and it's really remarkable the places Micron's products go today. When you think about the environment for mobile computing and for all the applications and activity that that drives, it's truly remarkable. Let me ask those of you in the audience, how many of you own a tablet, a laptop, or a smartphone? That's about 100%. If I asked you how many of you own two or three of those devices, I'd probably get a significant majority of you as well. These things are really ubiquitous, and whether they're smartphones or tablets, they're really mobile computers driving more and more demand for memory inside that system themselves.
The really wonderful thing for Micron is that it drives a whole ecosystem, a whole network of attached things, and a whole infrastructure that supports that network, all of which also demand more memory. The environment we find ourselves in today is one where our whole lifestyle has changed by virtue of these, what we call mobile clients, and that new lifestyle is feeding itself to drive more and more memory. When you think about the smart connected device, whether it's a smartphone or the laptop, on it resides numerous applications that could be games in the case of me and my kids, to calendars, to computing applications, to our calendars, everything we weave our daily lives.
More and more, it also interfaces with things like our cars or our health wristlets that track how many steps we're taking, in my case, not too many these days, as well as this whole network of carriers that send voice communication and texts and other information. All the data that we share with each other, whether it's pictures on Facebook or information about our careers on LinkedIn. All those soft services that reside out there in the cloud additionally drive a virtuous cycle of memory that then feeds back to the mobile client and drives growth there. That whole ecosystem is fueling demand for our products, but more importantly, is diversifying where those end products go. It's not just about a few customers building handsets, whether it's Apple or Lenovo or Huawei or Motorola or whatever.
It's also about the infrastructure and the servers that support all that activity and the consumer game boxes and all those types of applications as well. When you look at Micron's portfolio now, particularly as we've come together with Elpida and continue to broaden the application, we really have the most diversified set of end memory products to service all these applications supporting the mobile ecosystem. We feel very, very good about how we position the company and our opportunities for growth moving forward. I'm going to play a short video about some of those applications, then I'm going to ask Mark Adams to come up and talk about what's going inside the company before I come back and wrap up with a few thoughts about the path forward.
There is a strong thread of energy around wanting to do something new.
What excites me the most is our ability to use our unique position in memory technology to change the world.
It's all about what our customers need to win, creating innovation for them with our memory. We're at an amazing crossroads. We have the global scale, talent, product portfolio, unprecedented and unmatched by our competition.
I think that's what's exciting about it, to realize that you're one of a handful of companies that really have strong fundamentals in technology development.
Historically, our customers were able to use fairly standardized high-volume memory components, but going forward, that's not the case.
The form factor of the PC is the driving force behind how users get their experiences.
The premium segments that we're selling into are coming from a wide diversity of applications. Of course, there's cloud computing, there's tablets, there's automotive.
The memory footprint today in cars is really growing exponentially. They're trying to deliver that consumer experience in the car footprint.
We're working with a major car manufacturer in our systems lab in Munich to simulate a trip driving, for example, from Munich to Stuttgart. This gives us unique insight into how the memory and the memory subsystems are being used and optimize our future products to best meet their needs.
It enables us to build that architecture, build the solution, and then gain the business.
The mobile marketplace is just such a dynamic ecosystem.
In the past, it's meant mobile phones, but now these are mobile tools that are essential. This explosion in mobile devices is leading to the internet of connected things, and what this means is that everything interacts with everything.
Your thermostat, your refrigerator, your washer-dryer, your car infotainment platform.
To innovate is so incredibly strong.
The key is that we have to work very closely with this incredible diversity of customers who are developing very different devices for this new world.
Our mission is to help our customers use our machines to help change the world. Micron's been a big part of that in the memory subsystem of our supercomputers.
In advanced genetics, in image analytics, and in artificial intelligence, it will be memory more so than any other technology that enables these truly amazing applications to be brought forward and brought to life.
One of the biggest things that we're working on is new technologies in memory like Hybrid Memory Cube, which allows us to get much higher bandwidth and much more energy efficiencies. These are technologies that we've been working with in collaboration with Micron in the industry to bring forward and bring out in our next generation of supercomputer, which we're really excited about.
Innovation today is increasingly being enabled by memory. Micron has the best memory system solutions to enable those innovations, and we have the relationships with our customers and other partners to make them a reality.
Good morning, and thank you for letting me give you a brief update on how we've taken this wonderful opportunity that Mark set up and evidenced in that video, and how we're trying to turn it into an everyday working environment at Micron and how we operate the company. Coming out of 2013, you saw a lot of milestones in terms of restructuring, capacity acquisition, a lot of exciting things going on in terms of product development. If 2013 was the setup year, 2014, inside the company, we think about execution. The dimensions of executions we think about are in terms of how we add value to all this capacity that we have put in place over the last two years.
That value is in the area of increasing the type of things we do with that capacity to generate more margin for our products and helping our customers understand how memory can help them differentiate their products. That first item in our strategic objective for execution is around driving more value for that capacity. The second piece is these different markets that were identified in the video, and Mark referenced, when you think about networking and server and automotive, medical, consumer, it's increasingly putting different quality demands on our products along different dimensions. Endurance, availability, delivery. Our vendors and our customers are looking at us and asking us to be a much higher quality company because the memory is going to much more strategic footprint.
As we think about our business going forward, we're going to keep on driving our quality initiative to deliver the highest level quality in the memory business and beyond. Beyond what we've been very good at the company in terms of process leadership in both DRAM and NAND and other memory technologies, as we see these new application environments, they're calling for us to do more than just process leadership. I'll talk to you a little bit later, but I want to identify that we also are very focused internally on adding capabilities and competencies in the company to allow us to drive up more of a system solution, and that means more than just semiconductor advanced process technology. With this, the capabilities around the capacity, quality, advanced technology, we strive as a company to differentiate ourselves by offering an outstanding customer experience.
That customer experience can be on those metrics, in addition to making sure we have the right product at the right time for our customers. We continue to measure that, and we're focused on delivering outstanding performance to our customers so we can get their business in these newer and higher value bit areas. Finally, in the area of all the things we've got going on, we have to operate ourselves in the company effectively as a cost leader, because history has shown that the memory business has been a tough business, and we need to be conscious of the investments we make in the context of an overall operating model that will continue to allow us to be positioned very well for success in the future.
These segments, when you look at the 10 years and the shift in our business from what was primarily a commodity business in one technology area, DRAM, to where we are today, it's been a dramatic shift, I would argue that the next three to five years are going to be equally as dramatic a shift in our business, more from an area of what we do with our capacity and how we advance our customer relationships to differentiate their products. In doing so, we will take more of our capacity and put it in the areas that are on the higher end of these bar charts when you look at enterprise storage and networking, embedded, and server technology.
We put our capacity that first of all, it's obviously a better return for us on the operating side of our business, but it gives us a chance to actually take our memory products and put them in more strategic usage for our customers. That change in our business is requiring us to invest our resources on, again, beyond just the process and silicon level of our business. Things like controller, things like firmware, things like software management. We have an opportunity to take on more of a strategic play inside of our systems of our customers and outplay our competitors. In 2013, we continued to advance our process technology, both in DRAM and in NAND. We started shipping high volumes of our 25 nm product in DRAM. We have good line of sight for development and volume production of 20 nm in 2014.
We feel very good about our DRAM platform as we go forward. Equally in NAND, we advanced our leadership position in the process technology of NAND. The message that you'll continually hear from the company is that we're investing in other areas just beyond the process. Today, a lot of our memory goes out in what's called packaged solutions. That means taking a DRAM and a NAND product and packaging them with a controller, stacking them in some cases, and then putting them into a mobile architecture, putting them into a server storage architecture. When we see the potential for our business, it's no longer a industry standard JEDEC module that's defined, and we all compete for the same type of specification.
We all compete on unique opportunities to develop solutions for our customers, that's the opportunity we will continue to invest is beyond the silicon on capabilities in our company from an R&D perspective, and then to be able to manufacture effectively. This chart is a good illustration of where memory can play in the overall food chain, it's no longer just a instruction set code memory that we're marketing to in terms of the compute business. We have plenty of opportunities to innovate, we're also investing not just in today's technology, but emerging memory technologies that allow us to, again, add performance, either through low power, through endurance, and play a special, unique role in someone's solution. It would be true for servers as it would be for automotive companies. It would be true for high-end enterprise storage applications.
We have the opportunity to continue to invest in unique memory technologies that will be able to be differentiated when compared to our competitive solutions. This also gives us the opportunity to sell up a stack in the food chain. We continue to look on opportunities, as Mark mentioned, in being more of a systems and subsystems-related company. Mark gave us 2 good examples, Hybrid Memory Cube and enterprise storage. Both are advanced solutions, more than just the core memory technology. We're innovating, and Micron's driving innovation and differentiation with technology that allows for better performance, lower power utilization, more reliability. Our customers will continue to value that. When you look at enterprise storage as a classic example, that Micron is now selling technology that people run their storage applications on in the back end of their business. It's far different than an industry-standard computing DRAM module.
That's an opportunity for us, and we're continuing to invest resources in the company to drive our development of these types of system-level solutions. When you think about where Micron is on the capacity front and all that we achieved in 2013, Micron really is the largest provider of memory to the world. Our biggest competitor in Korea consumes most of their memory. This capacity that we've put in place for Micron allows us to be the largest provider of memory to our customers. Our customers are lined up behind us and are engaging with us in a new way to think about strategic uses of the architecture and how memory plays a role in their future systems. When you look at our manufacturing blueprint, as Mark mentioned, we've actually done a lot of work in the last year to try to make this more efficient.
Today, the best way to think about our memory landscape is that a majority of our mobile capacity, as well as our consumer graphics capacity, is in our Hiroshima fab. Our Taiwan operations is mostly around networking DRAM, and our non-volatile, both NAND and NOR high-volume manufacturing, is in Singapore. We believe we're on the path to a very efficient manufacturing model that will serve our customers as we engage in terms of the development and utilization of this capacity. Finally, when you look at our relationships, if you went back to my first chart, which showed you what we looked like in 2004 in terms of the end markets, you can imagine a much more narrow set of products aimed at a much more narrow set of customers.
The opportunity that we see in our business today is that there is not one set of common architectural blueprints for how we sell our products and where we sell them into. It's a much more diversified set of applications, and the customer engagements are more one-to-one, which means we're selling a solution to somebody as an application requires, as opposed to, again, a commodity product. The evolution of our business really is giving us a tremendous opportunity to engage with customers in a new way, and it's presenting a fantastic opportunity for the company. With that, I wanted to hand it back over to Mark.
Thanks, Mark. It truly is a really exciting time to be at Micron and to be in the memory business. I want to close with just a couple of thoughts around where we're going. Mark mentioned we've done a pretty good job over the last couple of years, five years or so, making significant progress, not only in terms of how we diversify across products, but also across technologies. You can see that as we began 2014, we had continued a migration to the mobile space, which I've told you is growing very, very quickly, but also to drive capacity up the stack. As we brought new capacity into the system in 2013, a lot of that necessarily was going into the PC compute segments and the mobile segments. That's great. In a strong market, we can do very, very well in those segments.
Over time, our strategy is to continue to move and diversify where those products go. The future for us is to take that capacity that we now have and rebalance and reestablish that target model that Mark talked about. That's a journey that's never over, but it's a challenge that this team fully accepts and thrives under, which is to think about how our customers use memory and really differentiate and diversify so that we're adding value for them. It's up and to the right. There's fantastic growth in all these segments, and when you think about what's going on from a DRAM perspective, obviously, a lot of it's about mobile. You can see that there's a lot of it also in servers, which really gives us an opportunity to differentiate on performance and quality.
There's a lot of it in automotive, industrial, and medical. There's growth everywhere. Again, we'll continue to move our products into those segments while participating in the strong growth. The most important thing on this chart is that when you aggregate all of this stuff up, the demand's growing in excess of 30% per year. This industry can no longer deliver in excess of 30% per year incremental bits just by moving down the technology path. What we think that does is provide an industry environment now that will be more stable and more beneficial to memory manufacturers on a go-forward basis. In NAND, you see a similar picture. Focus on SSDs for just a second. Roughly 60% year-over-year compounded through the years for SSD growth.
As Mark talked about, we're making significant investments to make sure that Micron not only is a participant in SSDs generally for the clients, but also at the higher levels for enterprise storage where we can really drive additional value for our customers and for our shareholders. We'll play across this space, but strong growth everywhere. Again, we believe that Micron has the opportunity with our customer relationships to move our bits into the most value-added pieces of this growth. Hopefully, everyone in the room feels pretty good about the performance we turned in for shareholders in 2013. We're not resting on our laurels. We've got a lot of hard work ahead to continue that as we move through 2014, and this team is clearly focused on that.
We want to be the world's best memory supplier. As we do so, we're going to be focused on continuing the strong financial performance that we were able to deliver in 2013 and doing that by focusing on a number of different things. First of all, the value-added segments. Continued diversification of products, continued diversification of customers, and making sure that the products Micron builds are delivering value for our customers, and therefore, for our shareholders. We're going to continue to drive, as Mark talked about, the best-in-class operations. We're measuring ourselves on thousands of parameters across our entire operation, comparing ourselves to our competitors, and looking for every opportunity to continue to improve, and we want to do that across the spectrum of everything we do.
We're investing in leading-edge technologies to provide not only the continuation and follow-on products to the broad portfolio we have today, but truly innovative solutions for the future. Finally, as we do all that, our guiding light is to make sure we're optimizing value for our customers and for our shareholders. With that, I'd like to take a pause here, and if we turn up the lights, I'll try and answer any questions that those of you in the room might have. Yeah, right here in the third row. She's going to hand you a mic.
Thank you. Having 90% of the market, I think, is a good news, bad news story. The good news is that you have 90% of the market. The bad news is that you have 90% of the market, and that could be bad news because my feeling is that you're susceptible to challenging other enterprises that might come in. My question is, it's good to have 90% of the market, but how can you protect that? How can you not become complacent as a company knowing that you have 90% of the market and keep the kind of performance that you've had in the past couple of years growing into the future?
Thank you. Yeah. We don't have 90% of the memory market. We have roughly 23%, 24%, 25% of the worldwide memory market. We've got room to grow within the existing market, and I truly believe we've got room to continue to grow the memory market itself. Typically, the memory market's been reasonably correlated to overall worldwide GDP growth, and I think that trend will continue. My hope and our aim is to make memory a more significant piece of the overall semiconductor pie as we continue to add value with some of these system-level solutions. This team is focused on being the world's best memory supplier, and we think if we focus on being the best, we'll continue to harvest those opportunities. It's not necessarily about growing market share for Micron right now.
It's about growing products in those market spaces where we're really, truly adding more value, so we grab a larger piece of the revenue pie, not only in memory, but in semiconductors generally. Is there a follow on?
Well, I'm confused. Are we on?
Yeah, you're good.
I'm confused. I thought the chart that we saw here showed you as having 90% of the market.
I mean
Memory devices.
Yeah, no, I'm not sure which chart you're referencing.
What was that chart showing? It showed 90% on in DRAM, I believe. Is that correct?
Capacity. It was the capacity growth slide.
Oh, I apologize. Mark Adams showed a slide that showed how many square inches of silicon Micron had at the end of the fiscal year 2013 versus how many square inches of silicon of manufacturing capacity we had at the beginning of the year. The scale of Micron's worldwide manufacturing footprint is roughly 190% of what it was at the beginning of 2013. Essentially, we doubled the size of the company from maybe roughly 12% or so of worldwide memory supply to roughly this 23%-25% of worldwide memory supply. Thanks for that clarification, in case anyone else was confused on that.
Besides supercomputing, what are the potential functional applications for the Automata chip?
Yeah. Think of the Automata chip really as not a central processing unit, but a processor accelerator that is programmed to perform specific processing functions. That could be anything under the sun that has to deal with large amounts of unstructured data. Let me give you a few examples. One might be DNA sequencing, where you're looking at huge streams of billions of bits of data and trying to find matches between what's going on with one set of data and the other set of data. The Automata Processor can pull all that data and compare very quickly, recognize patterns within that data, and therefore solve a DNA sequencing problem. It might be used in security.
Security is a wonderful application for something like this, where you can trap data real-time as it comes into a network switch or into your computer, identify viruses and kick out bad code. Anything, searches, anything where you're looking for pattern recognition, say, facial recognition. If you're walking around with your smartphone, hopefully five years from now, and there's an Automata Processor in there, you'll be able to identify the guy walking across the room at you real-time by comparing an image of his face to a library of data that might identify anybody in the world. Anything where you've got a large amount of unstructured data, the applications are enormous and phenomenal. I think you'll find eventually this type of computing will be ubiquitous. It's a slow fuse. We have to educate people how to use it.
We have to train people how to program it, we have to get everyone to understand how to incorporate it in end systems. It's not going to be a revolution for Micron overnight, but we think it is a revolution for information processing over time. Randy, let's go to the back there.
Thank you. I'd like to express my support for continued diversification of products, services, and these collaborative partnerships that you talked about. By pursuing these world-class technologies efforts, we can inspire our customers, our team members, our partners, stockholders to improve the quality of life for everybody. Memory is a wonderful thing, and like some other people have expressed, it's a risky thing. We know it. We've been out there 35 years at this. Just remember, it's Micron Technology that's got us here, not just Micron memory. I'd also like to express my support for the Micron Foundation in working with local communities to improve education and opportunities for all.
My question is, can you give us a vision of what the Micron Foundation will focus on in the next few years, what we as stockholders can do to support your efforts, what we can do together to provide more local opportunities once we've inspired these kids to technology careers?
Yep. Great. We appreciate your support, of course, in all our endeavors. In particular, relative to the foundation, I like the word inspired that you used. Part of what we want to do at the Micron Foundation is improve the capacity of the education system in the communities where Micron does business by inspiring students to really pay attention to STEM education and become very serious about making sure that they have the best-in-class education and therefore opportunities to add value for our communities downstream.
We will do that not only by sponsoring events and activities that help create that passion in the students, but also by funding activities that help improve our education infrastructure, whether it's the skill level of the teachers in our schools or the access that those schools have to other infrastructure elements, technology, learning environments, and things of that nature that can truly help improve STEM education. We're active in K through 12. We're also active in higher ed. We'll continue to do whatever we can in the communities where Micron's active to improve the capacity for STEM education and the interest level in STEM education. As shareholders and folks that are interested in Micron, there's a reason Micron's interested in this is because it's what creates the future.
Bright minds that truly understand the importance of science education and technology education, that's our feedstock for the future. In particular, in the communities where Micron operates, we think that's really important. You can support us by making sure that your elected officials understand how important it is, that those around you in the community understand how important it is, and that your children understand how important it is, that we're all moving in the same direction, which is a higher knowledge economy that can drive wealth creation for all of us. Thanks, Randy. In the back.
Good morning.
Good morning.
It's great to hear that you're looking out for the stockholders and that we see that the stock is continuing to go up. I look back to the days of 2000 when it sold for $88 and 2001 when it was down to $45, and then it's been on a steady decline over the years. What can we see as far as the timeline where maybe you return Micron to what it really should be valued at?
Okay.
Which I think is kind of low right now for the company that it is. What can you do for us, those of us that invested, unfortunately, at some of those higher prices and return it to those days of glory?
Right. Thank you. Well, first of all, I'll include myself in that group as a long-term shareholder and let you know that I'm very interested in doing what I can to drive the value of the share price going forward and return for all our shareholders. Having said that, I want to do it in a long-term, sustainable manner and in a responsible manner so that we have a company not just for the short term, but for the long term. I don't really want to get anywhere close to predicting what future stock performance of Micron might be. What I'm focused on and what our team's focused on is doing everything we can to improve the company and improve our ability to generate value for our customers and therefore generate value for our team members and our shareholders.
The things I talked about today are the fundamental things that will get us there. Over time, we'll have to see how the market reacts to the value that we're creating. I think we can do things to inspire confidence in the market, and we've been doing that as we move through time, just through sheer performance. I think ongoing sustained performance is an important factor in that overall outcome. Okay, I'm not seeing any more questions. I want to thank you all again very much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure