Shares of Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., a maker of flash memory drives for corporate and industrial uses, jumped Monday after an analyst called the stock a “top pick.”
Investors sent the stock up more than 12% Monday on a recent market value of more than $920 million.
Deutsche Bank AG analyst Sherri Scribner named STEC a top stock pick for this year, according to a report on financial blog barrons.com.
Monday’s bounce is the first real jump for STEC in some time.
In September, shares of STEC peaked at a gain of 800% since the start of 2009 on a market value of more than $1 billion.
The stock began to pull back in September over concerns about competition and slowing sales of STEC’s drives that use flash memory chips instead of spinning disks to store huge amounts of data for banks and retailers.
In September, STEC gave a conservative outlook for the fourth quarter and hinted that its top customer, EMC Corp. had a stockpile of drives and would slow its ordering.
The news sent shares plummeting and STEC lost two-thirds of its value by the year’s end.
The bad news seems to be priced into the stock, leaving room for a growth, according to Scribner.
She has a “buy” rating and a $36 per share price target on STEC. Shares were hovering at around $18 per share on Monday.
In a recent note to clients, Scribner said STEC is “the best pure-play way to play adoption of solid state drives in the enterprise market.”
