If you bought Micron Technology stock at the IPO, here’s how many shares you’d own now

Computer memory has been a profitable business for decades and Micron technology (MU -1.36%) has always been a major supplier of those crucial chips. The company was founded in 1978, made its first memory chip in 1981, and went public in 1984.

Micron grew over the next 20 years. It developed many industry standards and supplied chips for game-changing devices such as home computers in the 1980s and consumer electronics in the 1990s. Along the way, it acquired memory manufacturing operations from tech giants such as be Texas Instruments and Toshiba.

Micron Stock Split History

Micron’s stock soared in those heady days, so the company executed three stock splits between 1994 and 2000. The last was a 2-for-1 split in the spring of 2000, about two months before the dot-com bubble burst.

Here’s how a single Micron stock from before the spring of 1994 evolved into 10 stocks in a modern portfolio:

Data found and confirmed at Yahoo! Finance and YCharts. Table by author.

The initial investment in this case was around $25 near Micron’s market debut. Today, the 10 shares post-split are worth about $880. That’s a market-beating 3,450% gain over 30 years.

Like many of its peers in the tech sector, Micron won’t revisit its 2000 peak prices for several decades. The painful experience of the split just before the massive market crash 22 years ago makes Micron less likely to reach for the stock-splitting shears anytime soon.

That said, Micron broke that invisible barrier recently. The artificial intelligence (AI) boom should give the stock a new boost. The stock is still cheap in terms of price per share, so investors aren’t exactly clamoring for an immediate stock split. Ask again if and when Micron’s stock price gets closer to $1,000 than $100 a share — which should take years, even in a persistently high market.