Saturday, May 31, 2008

Weekly recap - May Closing

The stock closed at $4.8, up .17 or 3.7% for the week. More significantly, the stock is up $1.55 or about 48% for the month. The stock is up $2.05 or about 75% year to date. Those are staggering numbers but you have to remember that UT was one of (if not) the worse performing stocks in 2007, losing $6 or 68.5% (ouch). Here is an interesting fact, the stock has been up every month this year! Unfortunately for long time suffering longs, its still about $4 off from the 2006 closing price.

Here are some of the UT related news for the week.

Tiscali Italia NGN expansion contract win - "Tiscali will serve its ambitious growth plans using UTStarcom's complete next generation solution architecture including multi-service access, soft switching, integrated network management and a multitude of advanced services and applications.""We believe the NGN market will grow at double digit CAGR from 2007 - 2011," noted Stephane Teral, Principal Analyst, Service Provider VoIP, IMS, and Mobile Infrastructure, Infonetics Research." Tiscali Italia is not as big as Telecom Italia but does show UTs momentum in NGN, one of UTs core businesses. As usual, there was no contract amounts but does show the company executed the contract cleanly and is getting expansion contracts. I wish the growth rate was further clarified. Double digit could be 10% or 50%.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080527/aqtu013.html?.v=59

Blackmore speaks at Economist's Asia CEO Agenda 2008 Conference - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080528/aqw010.html?.v=52 The conference was held in Hong Kong on May 29, 2008.

Sigma Designs 1st quarter report - Sigma is maintaining their estimated worldwide iptv set top box market of14 million units. North America will have 4.2m, Europe 5m, and Asia 4.8m. For me personally, I sold out my sigma position at a loss due to their terrible quarterly performance and lack of visibility going forward. I may revisit this again in the future due to valuation and their iptv/blue ray markets but this brings back nightmare management credibility issues, which i cannot tolerate at this time (a person can only have so many project turnarounds and I don't plan on starting a sigma designs blog or group :-).

Looking ahead - There is another analyst meeting in New York that the company is planning to participate in (June 11) and the shareholder meeting (June 27). I also received the proxy hard copies and will take a look again. I'll have a posting on that for sure.

Compared to some of my trading friends, I worked also this Saturday on my real job so this posting is a bit late. We demolished a 60 ft. steel building in the San Francisco Bay Area this morning, one of dozens that we need to take down. Anyway, it was like one of those Myth Busters show as we had a cutter that just sliced through heavy steel, pretty neat! Have a good rest of the weekend to everyone. I just don't know why UT had a sluggish month :-) It really needs to pick the pace up to reach my year end targets (he he).