Chips mostly lower to start week ahead of key earnings; Monolithic Power slumps
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Monty Rakusen
Semiconductor stocks were mostly lower to start the week amid some profit taking after last week’s move higher, and a key earning report slated for later in the week.
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares fell 1.8%, even as Piper Sandler named the Jensen Huang-led company its top large-cap pick in the artificial intelligence accelerator market. “Our viewpoint is rooted in the belief that the overall [total addressable market] for AI accelerators will continue to rise in 2025 by ~$70 billion, and we see NVDA well positioned to capture most of the incremental TAM increase while ceding only a small bit to its merchant chip competitors,” analyst Harsh Kumar wrote in a note to clients.
Broadcom (AVGO), which was also mentioned positively at Piper Sandler, fell 3.8%, while Nvidia competitors AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC) fell 1.6% and 4.6%, respectively.
Tangentially, Monolithic Power Systems (NASDAQ:MPWR) slumped nearly 20% after research firm Edgewater Research said it may have lost share in Nvidia’s Blackwell line of GPUs to Renesas and Infineon. Conversely, Rosenblatt Securities defended the company and said there have been no technical issues from Monolithic.
Seeking Alphas has reached out to Monolithic Power for comment.
Semiconductor equipment stocks fell ahead of key earnings from Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT), set to be released after the close of trading on Thursday. A consensus of analysts expect Applied Materials to earn $2.19 per share on $6.96B in revenue for the coming quarter.
KLA Corp. (KLAC) and Lam Research (LRCX) fell between 3% and 4.5%, while Applied Materials slipped 2%. ASML (ASML) saw fractional declines.
Also seeing declines amongst S&P 500 semiconductor companies were Micron (NASDAQ:MU), which fell more than 4%; analog suppliers Texas Instruments (TXN), Analog Devices (ADI) and NXP Semiconductors (NXPI), each of which were down between 2.5% and 4%; and smartphone suppliers Qorvo (QRVO) and Skyworks Solutions (SWKS), which were down between 2% and 3% apiece.