Marvell CEO Expects Growing Bandwidth, 5G Demand Post-Pandemic

A chip company that supplies carriers and others expects 5G and bandwidth demand to keep increasing post-pandemic, its CEO said. Marvell expects the demand for bandwidth “to continue to grow stronger,” said CEO Matt Murphy on a Thursday investor call. “Major cloud and service providers are facing unprecedented demand for their services as a result of so many people working from home and are scrambling to add capacity to their networks. 5G has become a strategic priority for many nations.” Quarterly sales rose about 5% to $693.6 million from the year-ago period. That's about $14 million above the midpoint of its March 4 guidance, despite COVID-19's “massive disruption,” Murphy said. Q1 ended May 2. “The impact of COVID-19 turned out to be greater than expected in our storage business and lower than expected in our networking business,” he said. Marvell experienced stronger than expected demand from its data center and 5G infrastructure “end markets,” he said. The company just started shipping 5G products to Samsung. “We are still at the very beginning of the industry transition from 4G to 5G,” Murphy noted. His company's stock closed up 8.8% Friday at $32.62.