Quote:
Originally Posted by LazyScot
I agree it isn't good news, but it is not necessarily as bad as it looks.
First off, it appears (from yahoo) that the dollar has fallen by about 10% against their currency, which will account for a fair bit of the drop (I'd expect most things to be US dollar priced...).
Next, I thought that they made other products besides E-Ink displays -- it could be that the drop is on other products. We just don't know enough to guarantee that the drop is all down to the E-Ink displays.
The Year to Date seems roughly equal. I don't know the periodicity of their order cycle (from just one year's information). If they are still expecting a 20% drop, I'd guess that they still have some decent orders expected.
Finally, they say:
and
which makes me think that their E-Ink displays are doing rather well....
But then, as I've said before I'm an optimist so the truth might be different! |
Of course they make displays other than E Ink. They make LCD displays too. If you look at "Small- to medium-size LCD panel shipments miss 2Q targets" (7/10/08), you will notice they are expecting those sales to be off
30%. I can guarantee you their LCD sales are a huge portion of their overall sales right now. That is the larger story because its a) a bigger drop than in EPDs, and b) a drop in a well-established market. May be E Ink is actually starting to cut into LCD sales which is both good and bad for PVI. They are starting to go through the conversion process and as usual, it will be a bumpy ride.
To explain the variability in the monthly sales numbers, maybe things were a little front-end loaded. They ended the 1st quarter of 08 with 44% year-over-year growth. Especially in Feb 08, they had 73% y/y growth. Maybe things wouldn't look so bad relative to each other if the sales numbers were a little more spread out. Obviously there is a slowdown due to the economy or some other reason but they still currently have 6.5%y/y growth through the 1st half of 2008 even with the bad numbers of the 2Q.
I wonder how this would look if the currency conversion was normalized over the length of time.