Shares of two local tech stocks slumped Monday after the companies lowered their outlooks for the current quarter.
Newport Beach chipmaker Conexant Systems Inc. saw its shares fall about 22% in afterhours trading on a market value of about $66 million.
For the quarter ending in December, Conexant is expecting sales of $83 million to $88 million, down from its previous forecast of $103 million to $108 million.
Conexant is expecting to report a loss of $2.5 million to $4.5 million, down from its previous forecast of roughly $4.5 million to $6 million in profits.
Wall Street analysts, on average, are looking for profits of $5 million on sales of $112 million.
“With the worsening worldwide economic environment and the decline in consumer spending, demand for our products has softened considerably since we provided guidance for our first fiscal quarter at the end of October,” Chief Executive Scott Mercer said.
Mercer cited “numerous customer requests to cancel and reschedule orders.”
“At this point, it looks like the March quarter will pose challenges beyond the seasonal revenue declines we normally anticipate,” he said.
The company said it plans to continue cutting costs, but didn’t mention specifics.
Investors also dinged shares of Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., a maker of flash memory drives for industrial uses, after the company said a customer canceled a $20 million order.
The stock fell about 17% afterhours on a recent market value of $235 million.
For the current quarter, STEC lowered its sales outlook to $55 million to $59 million, down from its previous forecast of $69 million to $72 million.
It didn’t give a profit outlook.
Analysts are expecting STEC to see profits of $6 million on sales of $71 million.
The order cancellation was for flash memory from one of STEC’s older product lines.
The company said the cancellation will be partially offset by increased orders for its flash memory products used for laptops.
STEC also gave a worse-than-expected outlook for the first quarter of 2009.
It’s expecting revenue of $42 million to $50 million, short of analysts’ expected $64 million.
STEC makes solid state drives with no moving parts that it sells to makers of servers such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp., among others.
The company said it’s expecting revenue from all of its solid state storage product lines to total $70 million this year, up from $13 million from the same period a year ago.
