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 OmniVision Technologies (NASDAQ: OVTI) plummeted 16% after the camera chipmaker reported disappointing forward guidance with its 2014 fiscal first-quarter results.
So what: For the quarter, revenue increased 44.8%, to $373.7 million, missing analyst estimates, which called for sales of $376.58 million. Meanwhile, adjusted net income more than doubled over last year's fiscal first quarter, to $0.55 per share, beating estimates that called for earnings of just $0.43 per share on the same basis.
However, management also told investors to expect fiscal second quarter sales to be in the range of $375 million to $410 million, with adjusted net income per share between $0.36 and $0.53. For reference, that puts the midpoint of each range at $392.5 million and $0.445, respectively, which is below analyst's average estimates of earnings of $0.49 per share on sales of $406.6 million.
Now what: CEO Shaw Hong weighed in, saying:
For the first quarter of fiscal 2014, we are excited to report strong sequential revenue growth in spite of a slowdown in the smartphone market during the second half of the quarter. Nonetheless, as competition intensified in response to the market slowdown, the forecasts for some of our products were negatively affected and we did not see a sequential improvement in gross margin.
Despite OmniVision's seemingly impressive growth, I certainly can't blame investors for moving to the sidelines given those less-than-optimistic words -- at least until the company can prove it has what it takes to dig out of this rut.
