Marvell Technology's Products, Customers: A Cheat Sheet

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MRVL shares have tacked on about 50% year-to-date, outperforming the broader S&P 500 Index, which gained 20%.

In comparison, the iShares S&P NA Tec. Semi. Idx. Fd. SOXX has gained about 42%.

Marvell is a fabless semiconductor provider of high-performance, application-specific standard products.

Fabless semiconductor companies ones that design and develop chips but outsource the manufacturing.

Marvell has evolved from a supplier of standalone semiconductor components into a supplier of fully integrated platform solutions.

It has trimmed its exposure to consumer markets such as PCs and has instead focused on infrastructure markets such as enterprise, data center and service provider networks.

Marvel offers products under two broad groups, storage and networking, with the former fetching 52% of 2018 revenue and the latter 40%.

Storage Products

• Hard disk drive, or HDD, controller SoC: provides high-performance input/output interface control and is used by all major hard drive manufacturers.
• Solid-state drive, or SSD, controller SoCs: targeted at the market for flash-based storage devices and systems for the cloud, enterprise, consumer and mobile computing markets
• Preamplifiers: These transmit signals from the magnetic head reading and writing data to and from the HDD platter to the HDD controller SoC. These are designed into cloud, enterprise and client HDDs. 
• Software-enabled silicon solutions such as SATA port multipliers, bridges, SATA, SAS and NVMe redundant arrays of independent disk controllers: used by enterprise, data centers and cloud computing businesses.
• Fiber channel adapters for server connectivity as well as ASICs and adapters for storage system connectivity.

Networking Products

• Ethernet switches: these have innovative features such as advanced tunneling and routing, high throughput forwarding and packet processing.
• Ethernet physical-layer transceivers.
• Ethernet adapters and controllers.
• Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth integrated SoCs: These are integrated into end devices such as enterprise access points, home gateways and voice assistants, multimedia devices, gaming, printers, automotive infotainment and telematics units and smart industrial devices.
• Embedded processors: Marvell providers highly integrated semiconductors that provide single or multiple cores of processors, along with intelligent Layer 2 through 7 processing for enterprise, datacenter, storage, broadband, and consumer and service provider markets.

Marvell's embedded processors include OCTEON multi-core processors, the OCTEON Fusion-M family of wireless baseband processors, NITROX processors and ThunderX processors.

Customers

Marvell's target customers are OEMs and ODMs, which design and manufacture end-market devices.

Western Digital Corp WDC accounted for roughly 12% of Marvell's revenue in the fiscal year ended Feb. 2, 2019, according to the recent 10-K filing.

Toshiba Corp TOSYY, excluding Toshiba Memory Corp., which was divested in fiscal year 2019), contributed 11% of Marvell's top-line, and Seagate Technology PLC STX accounted for 10% of the revenue. 

Most of the customers are located in Asia. Sales to customers with operations in Asia accounted for 85% of Marvell's net revenue in fiscal year 2019.

Marvell shares were down 2.97% at $23.38 at the time of publication Wednesday. 

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