centralsteele on the Yahoo board found this...........
forbes.com
Codec Moment
IN A BOOM TIME FOR SEMICONDUCTOR stocks, one player has been left out. C-Cube Microsystems, a maker of video chips for digital devices like DVDplayers and set-top boxes, was spun off to the public in May from a parent with the same name.
At a recent $20 the new C-Cube (Nasdaq: CUBE) trades at just 2 times sales and 16 times earnings. Competitor Broadcom, at $250, sells at 104 times sales.
Campbell Gibson of TGT Capital Partners says the market still associates C-Cube with its onetime core business, supplying chips for things like karaoke machines. But C-Cube is pushing into more promising markets, most notably coder-decoder chips used in recordable DVD players, (see "Format War" By John C. Dvorak), Web-based phone service and streaming video. It's an enticing takeover target for Broadcom or Texas Instruments, which have big set-top box businesses but no codec lines, says Gibson.
--Leigh Gallagher |
