14 DAY TRIAL // Silicon Motion Technology is an integrated circuits design and engineering company that just announced that its sales for the second quarter of the year 2007 reached the mark of $44.1 million which represents an increase of 111 percent from the same period during the last year and a 23 percent increase over the first quarter of 2007. Silicon Motion's shipments increased too, totaling a number of 78.5 million units, the highest number of shipments in the company's history as it worked with well known computer hardware manufacturers in designing and producing new computer parts.
One of the most important contracts during the second quarter was the design and production of a solid state drive (SSD for short) embedded controller for the Asus company, that will use it in its new Asus Eee PC, "the US$199 low-cost Intel processor-powered notebook". Apart from Asus, Silicon Motion Technology has business contracts with Samsung Electronics for designing a brand new USB flash controller and "embedded SSD controllers for camcorders". With Kingston and Lexar Media, Mattel, Thomson, and Coby, the company also worked in designing new card reader controllers and other electronic products aimed at the general consumer market.
According to the news site Digitimes, "In addition to increased revenues, Silicon Motion pointed out that the second quarter marked the eighth consecutive quarter that it has maintained gross margins above 52%. Operating margins, excluding charges for the recent acquisition of South Korea Mobile TV IC design house FCI, increased to 28.8% from 27.8% in the first quarter". "Commenting on the results, Silicon Motion president and CEO, Wallace Kou, said that despite seasonal slowness, the company was able to see sequential growth in its core mobile storage product business of a respectable 7%, while its multimedia SOC business grew an impressive 64%, led by a near two-fold increase in shipments of MP3 SoCs".
Silicon Motion's president forecasts for the next quarter that revenues will not grow as most NAND memory producers are exhausting their inventories and moving to new fabrication processes. As a direct result of this situation, Silicon management expects an increase over the previous year of about 36 percent, with a gross margin in the 52% area.