What Happened?
Shares of semiconductor designer Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ:LSCC) jumped 5.6% in the morning session after the company held its 2024 Developers Conference where it launched offerings from both the new mid-range (Avant) and the small (Nexus 2) FPGA portfolios.
The Avant line of chips leverages more rigorous use cases requiring edge computing such as industrial robotics, autonomous vehicle networking, and machine vision (using cameras and computers to inspect and measure). Regarding Nexus 2, Lattice management believes it is competitive against similar offerings from AMD and Altera because it is more energy efficient, more secure, offers more performance, and is a smaller size.
As a reminder, FPGAs are Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, a type of semiconductor device that consists of a large array of programmable logic blocks and interconnects. These devices can be reconfigured after manufacturing to perform specific tasks, making them incredibly versatile. Lattice is a leader in the FPGA market, and yesterday's announcements illustrate why demand for the company's products could be robust in the coming year or more.
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What The Market Is Telling Us
Lattice Semiconductor’s shares are very volatile and have had 24 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 2 days ago when the stock gained 7.4% on the news that the Board of Directors approved a plan for the company to repurchase $100 million more in common stock, showing management's commitment to returning value to shareholders. Since late 2020, Lattice has bought back around 6 million shares, reducing share dilution by 4.3%.
Lattice Semiconductor is down 8% since the beginning of the year, and at $62.93 per share, it is trading 24.7% below its 52-week high of $83.57 from March 2024. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Lattice Semiconductor’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $3,211.
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