Marvell (MRVL) No Longer Marvelous?

The fates can turn quickly for a high-riding company, as Marvell(Nasdaq:MRVL) has found out, as they have moved out of favor not long after it was believed they had differentiated themselves from their competitors.

Several months ago, Marvell was smokin' hot. The company was apparently setting itself apart from Broadcom (Nasdaq:BRCM), Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN), and other competitors in the markets for networking chips and mobile processors, and the storage-controller segment was doing just fine despite slow PC sales.

Marvell's stock soared 7% on the release of third-quarter numbers, moving me to exclaim: "That's what you get for delivering the right technologies at the right time, something Marvell has had a knack for in recent years," said Anders Bylund at Motley Fool.

The fourth-quarter report is in, and Marvell is singing a very different tune now. Neither the press release nor the analyst call so much as mentioned "mobile processors" or the ARM Holdings (Nasdaq:ARMH) architecture that underlies Marvell's Armada processor line. The Armada name fell from CEO Sehat Sutardja's lips exactly once, and then only with the hope that adoption would accelerate in fiscal 2012.

Largest mobile customer Research In Motion (Nasdaq:RIMM) is shifting low-end 2.5G smartphones by the boatload in markets across the developing world, where 3G networks are hard to come by and 4G remains a pipe dream. Besides being an important data point for RIM investors, that's terrible news for Marvell, which is a major chip supplier for RIM -- but doesn't have 2.5G products available. The company has 2.5G products on tap but has yet to deploy them in meaningful volume to RIM or anybody else.





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