Business and Finance

Flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. has been of the hottest stocks on the market in December, up 52 percent in the past 19 trading sessions.

Milpitas-based SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) has gathered a number of positive analyst ratings during that time but there has been little else to explain investors' enthusiasm.

Its stock rose to a 52-week high of $30.14 in trading on Christmas Eve before closing at $30.13. It has more than quadrupled since hitting a 52-week low of $7.73 in March.

In its most recent quarterly earnings report, SanDisk posted a $231.3 million profit on a 14 percent rise in revenue to $935.2 million.

CEO Eli Harari said at the time, "We are encouraged by improved industry fundamentals and our increasingly diversified global markets, which bode well for further growth in the fourth quarter and in 2010 easy fast payday loans."

That followed word in September that South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Corp. had officially dropped a bid to buy SanDisk. Samsung's $5.85 billion offer was rejected last year as too low and later withdrawn.

The companies in May also signed a patent-license deal that reduces the threat of litigation between them in the flash-memory chip market.

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