Boston, MA 06/12/2014 (wallstreetpr) – Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ:MRVL) recently got an upgrade by Nomura on June 11. The stock was upgraded from ‘Neutral’ to ‘Buy’ with price guidance raised from $15 to $19. Shares of Marvel were up by 2.8% following the upgrade.
The reason:
The upgrade was mainly on account of Marvel’s increasing capability to develop wireless technology chips which work on LTE or Long Term Evolution and offers the fastest internet browsing speeds for mobile devices. This edge is making the company move ahead of Taiwan based competitor Media Tek, which is still into 3G based chips.
The Nomura analysts, Aaron Jeng and Sanjay Chaurasia, had the opinion that Media Tek faces a steep learning curve in introducing the 4G LTE and would also have a cost disadvantage overMarvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ:MRVL)& Qualcomm at least for the initial years. The shares of Media Tek were down by 0.8% following the upgrade of Marvel. Meanwhile, Nomura has cut its rating on Media Tek to ‘Reduce’ from the previous rating of ‘Buy’ and has given the learning curve which Media Tek faces, to be one of the reasons for the cut in ratings.
Nomura expects Marvel’s current year revenue from mobile and wireless offerings to grow by 64%, and it expects a year on year growth of 14%. Nomura is also positive about Marvel’s ability to show further growth in its 4G baseband sales.
Marvel’s Position:
The Nomura upgrade report said that Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (NASDAQ:MRVL) is well positioned in its FDD-LTT offerings. Moreover, its 4G LTE solutions have certification for voice and data from AT&T, and are certified for data by Verizon also. This certifications make Marvel offerings more attractive for Chinese OEM’s who are looking to export 4G LTE enabled handsets to North America and Europe
Moreover, increasing baseband demand has led to Marvel beating analyst estimates and delivering an earnings per share of $0.27 and revenue of $958 million for the first quarter 2014. Though Qualcomm still claims the lion’s share of the 4G-baseband market, it remains to be seen that how well Marvel maintains its current performance.
