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Tech stocks - Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Advanced Energy Announces Improved Revenue, Profits, and Products

The semiconductor industry and the solar industry can take a little comfort as Advanced Energy Industries (AEIS:NASDAQ) announced a 45.5 percent sequential increase in revenue. Little comfort as the $51.8 million reported by Advanced Energy is still far behind $84.5 million in the same quarter in the previous year.

Profits were still nonexistent as Advanced Energy reported a loss of $0.20 per share, much better than $0.38 per share loss reported in the previous quarter but still far off from the $0.13 per share profit reported in the same quarter in the previous year.

Sales to the semiconductor industry drove the company’s “success” as they were up 70.2 percent sequentially. The $20.8 million in revenue to the semiconductor industry represented 40.2 percent of the Advanced Energy’s revenues. One of Advanced Energy’s largest customers is Applied Materials (AMAT:NASDAQ) who is responsible for over 20 percent of their revenues.

CEO Hans Betz raved about the Solaron, a utility-scale inverter for solar power plants. Mr. Betz commented that orders for the Solaron exceeded the company’s current production capabilities. Unfortunately, revenues outside of the semiconductor industry only rose 39.2 percent sequentially to $20.3 million while representing 39.2 percent of Advanced Energy’s revenues.

This could change as Advanced Energy announced the new Solaron 250 today. Aimed at smaller scale applications like commercial rooftop solar installations, the Solaron 250 is a good fit for projects that require American-made products. Advanced Energy needs a wider range of products as its largest customer, Applied Materials, is quickly moving to improve its solar offering.

Advanced Energy also announced today that it will be selling is Solaron inverters in China through the Shanghai Guangdian Electric Group. With China currently outspending the U.S. on developing solar power plants, this agreement should help Solaron improve its revenues to 2008 levels as long as they can ramp-up their production capabilities.