Dented highflier STEC Inc. of Santa Ana was up on a down day for Wall Street Friday after an analyst upped his rating on the maker of a new type of drive.
STEC’s shares were up 2% in late afternoon New York trading on a market of $1.5 billion.
B. Riley & Co. analyst Mike Crawford upped his rating on the stock to “buy” from “neutral.”
The move is part of a sentiment among analysts that concerns about rising competition for STEC are overblown.
STEC has seen its shares soar more than 500% since the start of the year, though they’re off about 20% in the past month.
The company makes solid state drives, which have no moving parts and are being built into data storage networks in place of traditional disk drives because they use less power and are faster at some tasks.
For now, STEC has the market for solid state drives for business to itself.
Part of the company’s recent stock decline stems from announcements about competing drives from Irvine’s Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc., a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp., Northern California’s Smart Modular Technologies Inc. and Milpitas-based Pliant Technology Inc.
Traditional disk drive makers Hitachi Ltd. of Japan, Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp. and Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC also plan solid state drives.
Crawford and other analyst see STEC’s monopoly ending but expect the company’s early lead to hold.
For more on STEC, see the Sept. 28 edition of the Business Journal.
