Volterra Semiconductor Corporation is one of those industry players that sit in the back, designing advanced components that get implemented on motherboards for servers, notebooks, high-end desktops and other boards such as audio accelerator cards from UAC or high-end graphics cards from ATI and nVidia.
A company that can be described as the ZF gearbox of the semiconductor world that got hammered hard during the recession, as high-end sales wound down. But after reading through first quarter results, one cannot but wonder is the recession over or are we going through the peak in a "W-shaped market recovery"?
Volterra reported 1Q2009 revenues in the tune of $18.3M [-16% from 1Q2008], up from consensus of $17.4M. The company also scored a moderate profit. When it comes to looking into the future, Volterra sees growth to $21M, or 14.3% more than in 2008 - pre-market meltdown.
If the recession is really ending, Volterra will continue to go up in sales and that should be expected: Intel will launch Thurley server platform [Nehalem-EX], Gainestown [Nehalem-EP] should sell in volumes, AMD will launch sexa-core Istanbul and both AMD GPG and nVidia are on track to launch their DirectX 11 GPUs this coming summer.
If we see a small drop - it will mean that the IT world could go on a roller-coaster ride once more and that a W-shaped recession recovery thesis was true.
