Is this pose a serious threat to CUBE's PC-DVD business?
cbs.marketwatch.com
Sigma has road-show designs
By Thom Calandra, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 11:36 AM ET Mar 4, 1999
StockWatch Chat
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Road-show alert. Road-show alert.
Sigma Designs, a maker of PC-DVD upgrade kits,
will head to New York, Boston and Philadelphia
next week to educate fund managers about its
MPEG chips, one shareholder says. The chips
compress and decompress digital audio and video
signals.
The California company's conference call this
week, led by CEO Thinh Tran, revealed that Sigma
(SIGM) is winning business from C-Cube
Microsystems' (CUBE) largest digital video disk
customer, Creative Technologies (CREAF). "This
effectively gives Sigma Designs a 100 percent
market share in the PC-DVD upgrade kit market,"
says shareholder Glenn Holbert.
The kits let folks view Hollywood movies and
video on their computer screens and television sets.
Holbert, who says Sigma Designs shares have
languished amid virtually no Wall Street coverage
of the company, has a new MPEG-2 chip that has "an excellent chance to
be included in a number of set-top box configurations by various OEMs."
The company's fourth-quarter sales rose 33 percent to $13 million from
the year-ago quarter. The loss was $1.4 million, or 10 cents a share. The
company posted about a $200,000 operating profit last quarter.
Matsushita and IBM intend to use the tiny company's REALmagic DVD
decoder for their DVD upgrade kits.
Sigma shares at 5 3/4 on Nasdaq give the
company a market worth of about $82 million, or
two times last fiscal year's sales of $43 million. We
last wrote about the company in November, when
the market cap was $35 million. See the original
column. |
