Westell shares pummeled after soft guidance

Westell Technologies reported first fiscal quarter revenues of $75.6 million, a 35% jump from the same quarter last year.

Investors, though, were not impressed, instead focusing on guidance that suggests the second quarter will be difficult. In afternoon trading, Westell shares were down more than 30% to $4.40 per share. On a conference call today, Nicholas Hindman, senior vice president and CFO, said the company was expecting second-quarter revenue to come in between $61 million and $64 million. In the second fiscal quarter of last year, the company reported revenue of $61.4 million.

The company sited a number of factors for the coming revenue decline, including a changing product mix, the timing of customer orders and some pricing pressure.

“On the [product] mix, it is primarily a move from VersaLink [gateways] back to the some of the basic modems,” Hindman said during the call. “It’s a move back at least temporarily to the lower-priced products.”

Van Cullens, president and CEO of Westell, added that the company is still confident in its overall product strategy and was looking at a number of remedial actions including realigning its costs with suppliers and reassessing some R&D work.

“Our task is to take quick remedial action where we can find them and get our new products into volume deployment as soon as possible,” he said. “We’re going to make every effort to improve our second-quarter guidance.”

One other issue is the timing, Cullens said.

“A lot of this we’re doing in real time,” he said. “Our concerns about how the product mix may change, and some pricing discussion, occurred just over three weeks ago. We’re still processing through our assumptions as to how this might affect us, and that’s what bore heavily on our guidance. We are still looking at some unknowns.”