Israel Stock Ideas

[gfp927z]

Mellanox -- >>> Mellanox Stock Falls Hard On CFO Retirement News


By PATRICK SEITZ

9-10-12

Investors Business Daily


http://news.investors.com/technology/091012-625121-mellanox-stock-falls-on-cfo-retirement.htm?ven=yahoocp,yahoo




Shares of fabless semiconductor maker Mellanox Technologies (MLNX) were down 10.6% in early trading Monday after the company said its chief financial officer planned to retire.

It was the second straight trading day of big declines in the once highflying stock, which hit an all-time-high of 120.05 on Thursday, at that point up 270% on the year. The stock, though, seems to have found support at its 50-day moving average price line.

Shares fell 9.1% on Friday as Stifel Nicolaus downgraded the stock to hold from buy, as we noted.

On Monday, Mellanox said Chief Financial Officer Michael Gray, who has been in the job since December 2004, will retire effective Nov. 5. The board appointed Jacob Shulman, Mellanox's vice president of finance, to replace him. Mellanox described the move as a "planned transition." It said Gray has no plans to join another company in a similar capacity and intends to spend more time with his family. He will be employed by the company until Feb. 4.

Mellanox's high-speed interconnect products for servers and data storage systems are hot sellers as companies build out their infrastructures for cloud computing, data centers and so-called "big data" analytics, systems that help companies analyze the tons of data they are accumulating in the Internet era.

The Israel-based company is expected to report third-quarter results around Oct. 26. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Mellanox to earn $1.13 a share excluding items, on sales of $153.1 million. That would translate to year-over-year gains of 265% and 125%, respectively.

Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman told analysts in July that the company's industry-leading InfiniBand technology was becoming the interconnect of choice for cloud and Web 2.0 data centers. Mellanox also is working closely with Microsoft (MSFT) to integrate its technology into Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2012 operating system, he said. The new server OS is due out in Q4.

<<<