Semiconductors sink as Arm breaks below IPO price
Sep. 21, 2023 1:37 PM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia,SA News Editor
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Semiconductor stocks fell on Thursday, as investors worried about the latest interest rate decisions from the Federal Reserve and newly publicly traded Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) slipped below its initial public offering price.
Arm ( ARM) sharesfell nearly 4% to $50.84shortly before 1:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, slightly below the offering price of $51 per share.
Last week, Arm ( ARM) returned to the public markets after being acquired by Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank ( OTCPK:SFTBY) in 2016. Initial enthusiasm for the British chip design firm was exceptional, as shares rose more than 25%on their first day of trading, but have steadily declined since then.
Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) shares fell around 1%- though off their worst levels of the session - after Google ( GOOG) ( GOOGL) said it saw "no change" to its relationship with the San Jose, California-based chip supplier.
Earlier on Thursday, The Information reported that Mountain View, California-based Google ( GOOG) ( GOOGL) could make the move to drop Broadcom ( AVGO) as soon as 2027 in an effort to save on computing costs related to artificial intelligence, citing a person with direct knowledge of the effort.
The news outlet added that Google ( GOOG) ( GOOGL) could also replace Broadcom ( AVGO) with a custom chip from Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) that connects servers to ethernet switches inside data centers.
Marvell ( MRVL) shares initially rose on back of the report, but lost steam and fell nearly 1%at mid-day.
Micron (NASDAQ: MU) shares slipped around 1%even as Wedbush Securities said the company's fundamentals are starting to "inflect" ahead of next week's fourth-quarter earnings release.
"While there are certainly still areas of weakness in the memory sector (particularly reduced hyperscale demand, but also soft enterprise requirements with handset and PC end markets hovering close to cyclical bottoms), we saw a few positive inflections over the course of Micron's quarter that should benefit outcomes at the margin, while setting up more favorable dynamics in FQ1'24," analyst Matt Bryson wrote in an investor note dated Thursday.
Most other semiconductor stocks were lower on Thursday, including Nvidia ( NVDA) and AMD ( AMD), which fell 1.8% and 3.1%, respectively. Qualcomm ( QCOM), Texas Instruments ( TXN) and Analog Devices ( ADI) saw more modest declines.
Conversely, industry stalwart Intel ( INTC) bucked the trend and tacked on 1.2%. |
