AI infrastructure demand continues to heat up, Delta Electronics (2308) shares surged from 3 digits to break above 2,000元 this year, hitting a high of 2,585元, before being slammed to the limit-down price of 1335元 intraday on October 30, a pullback of more than 48%. According to third-quarter results, revenue reached 1,970.59億元, up 7.53% QoQ and 31.09% YoY, with after-tax net profit of 234.95億元, up 26% YoY but down 6.5% QoQ, and EPS of 9.04元. Revenue grew but profit performance has drawn market attention.
Third-Quarter Revenue Growth but Profit Misses Expectations
Senior analyst Lian Qianwen noted that although revenue continued to grow, EPS came in below the market consensus of 10.4元, and gross margin of 34.08% also missed expectations of 36.2%, a gap of more than 2 percentage points. In addition, Thai subsidiary Delta Electronics Thailand booked inventory write-down losses, further squeezing quarterly profit, making it the main reason the quarterly results missed expectations.
800VDC Ramp-Up Yet to Come and Cost Pressure
The market had high expectations that Delta Electronics's 800VDC power architecture would ramp up quickly with the launch of NVIDIA's new-generation AI servers, but NVIDIA still mainly uses a 54V power architecture, and 800VDC has not yet been adopted at scale. Even though some equipment has started to adopt it, actual application scale remains limited, making it difficult to contribute meaningfully to revenue in the short term. In addition, rising metal component prices continue to squeeze gross margin, and with the U.S. Section 337 patent investigation, Delta Electronics being named in the investigation is bound to bear the brunt, which has also become one of the factors pressuring the share price recently.
Two Rebound Signals and Investment Advice
Lian Qianwen is not bearish on the long-term outlook, arguing that AI data centers are still expanding, with huge demand from power supply units and liquid cooling to power infrastructure, and Delta Electronics remains a key beneficiary of the industry trend, but the short-term share price and fundamentals still need time to rebalance. For trading, investors already holding shares can wait and see, with no need to rush to sell on short-term declines, nor should they aggressively add positions, and should wait for revenue and profit performance to stabilize gradually; investors not yet invested should not rush to buy the dip just because the share price has corrected sharply, and should not try to guess the bottom at this stage. Key indicators to watch ahead are, first, whether NVIDIA begins large-scale adoption of the 800VDC architecture, or faster progress in ASIC-related products adopting 800V power architecture, and second, whether Delta Electronics's revenue and profit can beat market expectations significantly. Only concrete positive news on product adoption progress or actual results will have a chance to attract buying interest again and bring rebound momentum to the share price.