Marvell: “A product cycle company”
Check other articles in the series...By Vijay Nagarajan, Guest Author
As part of our coverage of the mobile chip vendor space, we looked at Qualcomm, InterDigital, Broadcom and Texas Instruments in great detail. We now move on to another interesting and aggressive fabless semiconductor company – Marvell Technology group. Earlier coverage on Marvell can be found here, here and here.
Marvell provides application-specific standard products (ASSPs). The company has substantial expertise and intellectual property in the areas of DSP, embedded ARM-based microprocessor, analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design. These strengths are responsible for Marvell’s phenomenal rise in the storage market. Today, the Santa Clara-based company (incidentally, Atheros’ back-door neighbors and competitors) leverages this expertise to develop high-performance System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions for various markets.
Marvell’s product portfolio includes solutions for data storage, Ethernet, cellular, wireless networking, personal area networking, video-image processing and power management solutions. Marvell serves a variety of markets including convergence of voice, data and video in consumer electronics goods. Marvell’s customers include storage companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Western Digital, networking companies like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Foundry Networks, and cellular companies including Research in Motion (RIMM), Motorola, and Palm.
Marvell, in the words of its CEO Sehat Sutardja, is “inherently a product cycle company.” He continues to say that the company’s growth rate is directly related to new product adoption and transition. The strategy is to look at long-term investments that can grow on a top-line basis at 15-20% y-o-y. In the context of the current situation, this directly relates to Marvell’s thinking behind the acquisition of Intel’s applications and communications processor business.
We can divide the company’s products into three broad business areas namely storage, Ethernet and wireless. Besides these, other major products include solutions for VoIP, printing, digital video processing and power management. With this as a background, we should be able to take a deeper look at Marvell’s fortunes moving forward.
This segment is part 5 in a 13 part series Fiscal 2008 financials →
Jump to part: Marvell, Marvell, Intel Deal Intelligent?, Money, “A product cycle company”, Fiscal 2008 financials, Storage Market Leadership, Ethernet business, WLAN market, Connectivity Solutions, Mobile Strategy and Outlook, Valuation, Achievable
[…] month, Vijay completed his in-depth analysis on Marvell, in which he looks at its strengths: its storage and Ethernet businesses, where it is no.2 behind […]