SanDisk Corp CEO Eli Harari said investors' concerns about the computer memory maker's exposure to the US consumer economy are misplaced, pointing to the company's robust overseas sales.

Shares of SanDisk fell 11.67 per cent to $25.42 on Friday, a day after the company gave a first-quarter revenue forecast that disappointed Wall Street, overshadowing stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter results.

The memory chip maker expects to take advantage of burgeoning consumer demand for tablet-style portable devices, such as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad, Harari told Reuters in an interview.

"I think that people are concerned that we are too dependent on the consumer economy," he said. "Approximately 70 per cent of our sales in the fourth quarter were outside of the US, so we are not dependent on the US economy."

SanDisk -- whose rivals include Samsung Electronics, Toshiba Corp and Hynix Semiconductor -- is the No. 1 maker of flash memory cards used in digital cameras and other electronic devices.

It gets about 56 percent of revenue selling embedded flash memory to technology equipment makers and the rest from selling items like memory cards to customers at retail, Harari said.

SanDisk was one of the biggest losers on Nasdaq on Friday, and the sell-off eroded the stock's lofty gain of 33 per cent since its last quarterly report.

In a report to clients on Friday, Wedbush analyst Betsy Van Hees raised her 2010 profit forecast for SanDisk and lifted her target price to $25, but calculated SanDisk's stock outlook at a lower multiple to future earnings than for its peers.

"We believe the company should trade at a discounted multiple given its heavy dependence upon the consumer and its trailing position in the growing end markets for NAND flash," Van Hees said.

Harari said there may be a measure of caution in the company's outlook for the quarter. After all, SanDisk also said it sees full-year 2010 revenue increasing by 12 percent to 23 percent, to a range of $4.0 billion to $4.4 billion. Wall Street analysts had, on average, expected $4.3 billion.

"We need to be reasonably conservative," he said. "I think 2010 should be a good year, but at the same time we are just in January."

One area that could benefit all flash memory makers is the nascent market for tablet computing devices, such as the Kindle and iPad. The Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month was abuzz with digital readers and tablets but the iPad trumped them all at its unveiling on Wednesday.

Harari said he was all smiles when he attended Apple's iPad event, saying these devices with multimedia features will call for "a huge consumption of flash."

It's just wonderful," he said. "I think that as demand is created, (the industry is) going to benefit from that, whether it's in the card form or embedded, it still uses up NAND flash."     Harari declined to specify whether the iPad used SanDisk's memory products, saying only that SanDisk sells its flash to the top 10 handset makers. – Reuters