Transition to SSDs From HDDs in Laptops ‘Almost Complete’: Marvell CEO

Revenue in Marvell Technology’s consumer end market was $178.5 million in its fiscal Q1 ended April 30, growing 7% year over year, said CEO Matt Murphy on a quarterly earnings call Thursday. Robust demand for solid-state-drive controllers is driving the growth in Marvell’s consumer segment, “partially offset” by declines in its PC hard-drive business, he said. Revenue in Marvell’s consumer market declined 4% sequentially from Q4, “below our forecast for a flattish outlook, due to a reduction in demand” for PC hard drives, he said. “While we are not the bellwether of global PC demand as it represents a relatively small amount of our revenue, we did see a rapid change in tone from the PC market, and we expect the weakness to continue,” he said. From Marvell’s “perspective,” the shift from hard drives to solid-state drives in the notebook PC market is “almost complete,” he said. Q1 revenue in Marvell’s carrier infrastructure end market, including 5G, was $252 million, up 5% sequentially and 50% year over year, said Murphy. That was on top of a “sequential step-up” of more than 30% in Marvell’s 5G business in its fiscal Q4, he said. “The growth in 5G deployments, combined with Marvell product ramps at multiple base station customers, continues to fuel strong growth in this end market.” Revenue in the carrier end market for fiscal Q2 ending late July is expected to grow by high-single digits sequentially and by 40% year over year, he said.