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In order to justify the effort of selecting individual stocks, it's worth striving to beat the returns from a market index fund. But its virtually certain that sometimes you will buy stocks that fall short of the market average returns. Unfortunately, that's been the case for longer term Silicon Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ:SLAB) shareholders, since the share price is down 28% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return of around 24%. The more recent news is of little comfort, with the share price down 23% in a year. More recently, the share price has dropped a further 26% in a month.
Since Silicon Laboratories has shed US$562m from its value in the past 7 days, let's see if the longer term decline has been driven by the business' economics.
Silicon Laboratories isn't currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. When a company doesn't make profits, we'd generally hope to see good revenue growth. As you can imagine, fast revenue growth, when maintained, often leads to fast profit growth.
In the last three years Silicon Laboratories saw its revenue shrink by 14% per year. That's not what investors generally want to see. The annual decline of 9% per year in that period has clearly disappointed holders. And with no profits, and weak revenue, are you surprised? However, in this kind of situation you can sometimes find opportunity, where sentiment is negative but the company is actually making good progress.
The company's revenue and earnings (over time) are depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).
This free interactive report on Silicon Laboratories' balance sheet strength is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.
A Different Perspective
Investors in Silicon Laboratories had a tough year, with a total loss of 23%, against a market gain of about 6.2%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. On the bright side, long term shareholders have made money, with a gain of 3% per year over half a decade. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. You could get a better understanding of Silicon Laboratories' growth by checking out this more detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow.