Marvell warns on Q4 citing weaker cloud capital spending

Marvell Technology Group updated its financial guidance for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, which ended on February 2, 2019. The company now expects its fourth-quarter fiscal 2019 preliminary unaudited revenue to be in the range of $735 million to $745 million, below its previously announced guidance range of $790 million to $830 million.

Marvell said the majority of its fourth-quarter revenue shortfall was due to a weaker than expected storage controller business. The company believes demand for its products was impacted primarily by macroeconomic uncertainty, reduction in cloud capital spending and PC CPU shortages. The exception was embedded processors for networking and 4G & pre-5G wireless infrastructure which met expectations.

The company expects the weakness in demand that it saw in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019 to continue in the first quarter of fiscal 2020.

"Although we are disappointed with our fourth quarter revenue, we continued to run the business efficiently under difficult end market conditions and are satisfied with gross margin execution and operating expense management," said Matt Murphy, President and CEO. "We are optimistic that demand will begin to improve later this year, as inventory levels adjust in customer's supply chains, and capital spending picks up. While we will prudently manage our operating expenses to reflect this softer demand environment, we remain committed to the key initiatives that we outlined at our Investor Day and are on track to launch our 5G base station products later this fiscal year. We have conviction in our strategy to drive long-term growth and we remain focused on execution."