Santa Ana-based STEC Inc. said it struck an order for $120 million worth of a new type of data storage drive and projected yearly sales of the product at $220 million, sending its already soaring shares even higher.
Shares of STEC closed up more than 15% Thursday on a market value of $1.5 billion. The shares are up more than 500% for the year so far.
STEC said one of its largest customers ordered more of its ZeusIOPS drives for the second half of 2009. STEC didn’t name the customer.
Customers include EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd.
The ZeusIOPS drive is used to store information on computers in data storage networks or servers. STEC’s drives use flash memory instead of the disks found in traditional disk drives.
The drives are known as solid state drives since they have no moving parts. They are more durable and use less power than disk drives and work in extreme temperatures.
STEC has been seeing surging sales of the drives that have surpassed expectations.
In June, it said first-half sales of the ZeusIOPS drives were expected to be $80 million, up from prior forecasts of $65 million and $53 million.
STEC enjoys a near monopoly on solid state drives.
Some potential competitors have entered the fray in the past year, including Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp. and Fountain Valley-based Kingston Technology Co.
Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC, which along with Western Digital dominates the market for traditional drives, also is rumored to be developing solid state drives but hasn’t made any big announcements.
