OCZ kills its DRAM lineup to focus more on SSDs

Posted on Tuesday, January 11 2011 @ 14:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
It's only Tuesday and the week has already been quite eventful. Yesterday Intel announced it will cough up a total of $1.5 billion for a cross-license agreement with NVIDIA and shortly after that news hit the wire that AMD's board has thrown out CEO Dirk Meyer.

A third shocker of the week is found in OCZ's quarterly earnings report, as the company announced it will leave its roots and phase out all remaining DRAM products by the end of the company's current fiscal year of February 28, 2011.

The move is a result of continued weakness in the global DRAM market, OCZ's memory revenue has dropped over 70 percent in the last two year, from $22.04 million in fiscal Q3 2009 to $6.26 million in fiscal Q3 2011. The company will increase its focus on solid state disks, as this market segment has seen its revenue grow from $2.16 million to $41.47 million in the same timeframe.
OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and memory modules for computing devices and systems, reports its third quarter 2011 results (Q3'11), which ended on November 30, 2010.

Net revenues in Q3'11 were a record $53.2 million, and increased 40% both on a year-over-year and sequential basis, from $38.0 million reported in Q3'10 and in Q2'11.

SSD revenues reached a record $41.5 million in Q3'11, an increase of 325% over Q3'10 SSD revenues of $9.8 million, and a 105% increase sequentially over Q2'11 SSD Revenues of $20.2 million.

In August 2010, the Company announced a strategic optimization of its memory products whereby it discontinued certain unprofitable commodity memory module products with the intent to continue only with certain high-performance memory products. However, since that time, there has been well-chronicled, continued weakness in the global DRAM markets.

Having balanced this DRAM market weakness against the capital needs of the Company's growing SSD products, the board has determined that it is in the best interests of the stockholders to accelerate plans to discontinue its remaining DRAM module products by the end of its current fiscal year of February 28, 2011. Accordingly, our DRAM products are now expected to have minimal, if any, sales in the next fiscal year and beyond.

Reporting on a GAAP basis, which includes certain items related to the accelerated discontinuation of the Company's DRAM products, the acquisition of certain intellectual property, changes in warrant derivative valuation, and other non cash charges, GAAP net loss for Q3'11 was $8.3 million, or $0.29 loss per diluted share. This compares to GAAP net loss of $1.0 million, or $0.05 loss per share in Q3'10.

Non-GAAP net loss for Q3'11 was $0.9 million, or $0.03 loss per diluted share, as compared to non-GAAP net loss for Q3'10 of $1.6 million, or $0.07 loss per share.

"Revenue generated from our Solid State Drive products for the third fiscal quarter more than doubled on a sequential basis," said Ryan Petersen, Chief Executive Officer of OCZ Technology. "SSD revenue accounted for 78% of our revenue and just by itself exceeds our historical quarterly revenue totals across all categories, thus reinforcing our decision to discontinue our remaining DRAM products."

Mr. Petersen concluded, "We have focused on building the OEM and enterprise segments of our business, and last month we announced a mass production order from a Tier 1 OEM for our enterprise class SSDs, reflecting the reliability, speed and total cost of ownership solid state drives provide over traditional mechanical hard drives. We believe the market opportunity for SSDs is significant, and to that end, we will continue to invest in research and development to extend our leadership position. We also plan to increase our sales and marketing efforts in order to facilitate continued revenue growth and increased market share as SSDs gain adoption in all segments."


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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