Shares of storage-controller designer Silicon Motion Technology (Nasdaq: SIMO) are up by more than 30% today. Do I really need to tell you how good the fourth-quarter earnings report was?
Analysts had expected flat sales and declining earnings compared to last quarter, but the company shocked 'em all with 17% sequential revenue growth and 12.5% higher earnings per depositary receipt.
Management said that storage controllers for solid-state drives and other flash-based memory products drove this outperformance. Samsung was a very good customer this quarter, which is always a nice feather in Silicon Motion's hat because Sammy is perfectly capable of whipping up controller chips on its own.
This micro-cap chip designer serves every part of the flash memory market, including market leaders Samsung and Micron Technology (Nasdaq: MU). Rabid demand for these chips should indicate healthy demand for the memory makers' end-user products as well. Memory chips may be getting cheaper, but that doesn't necessarily hurt the controller chips any.
Is this a flash-in-the-pan performance or the start of sustainable good news for Silicon Motion's shareholders? Our CAPS community seems to lean toward the "good news" side of things, judging by the five-star stock rating out of five and 98% ratio of thumbs-up calls. The stock is very reasonably valued in light of its growth prospects, assuming that tablets and smartphones stay hot for a few more years, and it's also an alternative avenue to investing in SSD storage without buying drive builders STEC (Nasdaq: STEC) or SMART Modular Technologies (Nasdaq: SMOD).
I'm giving Silicon Motion a thumbs-up rating in CAPS right now. I may have missed the ideal entry point when the stock was 30% cheaper, but there's still plenty of upside left in the stock. You can follow my all-star example in just a couple of clicks.
