ON Semiconductor's Shares Jumped: What You Need to Know

Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.

What: Shares of energy management chip maker ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ONNN  ) power-surged as much as 12.8% overnight on very heavy trading.

So what: Third-quarter sales jumped 50% year over year thanks to the audacious acquisition of Sanyo's semiconductor division, while earnings stayed roughly flat at $0.25 per share. These numbers were right in line with analyst estimates, but investors heaved a huge sigh of relief over the relatively limited impact of the flooding disaster in Thailand. The $60 million revenue hit is bad, but ON is rerouting orders to other factories and things could have been much worse.

Now what: The damaged Thai facilities come from Sanyo, so there's a bit of unfortunate timing for that deal. But Sanyo's market footprint helps ON compete more effectively with traditional rivals Fairchild Semiconductor (NYSE: FCS  ) and STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM  ) , and perhaps to stave off relative newcomers in the power management game such as Cirrus Logic (Nasdaq: CRUS  ) . In the long run, ON will be happy to have made this enormous acquisition.

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