Although we don't believe in timing the market or panicking over market movements, we do like to keep an eye on big changes -- just in case they're material to our investing thesis.
What: Shares of Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: PSMI) fell more than 16% Tuesday after the company turned in disappointing fourth quarter results.
So what: Quarterly sales fell 31% to $43.3 million, which translated to an adjusted net loss of $0.16 per diluted share. By comparison, analysts were modeling a net loss of just $0.03 per share on higher sales of $45.09 million.
Worse yet, Peregrine projected current quarter sales to be in the range of $33 million to $36 million, compared with Wall Street's expectations for sales of $43.45 million.
Now what: Management also claimed while they see a "number of challenges facing the smartphone industry" in 2014, they believe their progress in developing an integrated RF front-end leaves them nicely positioned to rebound in 2015.
Even so, that's little solace for investors who don't enjoy the thought of watching their company bleed red ink for the next few quarters. And shares don't look particularly cheap trading around 37 times last year's earnings and 22 time next year's estimates. Keeping in mind those estimates are likely to fall as analysts have time to fully digest today's news, I can't blame investors for stepping to the sidelines for now.
