QLogic in Stratosphere

What a difference a couple of weeks can make.

At the beginning of July, QLogic Corp. in Costa Mesa was just bubbling under Wall Street’s radar. The company, which makes products that link disk drives and other peripherals to computers, watched its stock price float between the mid-$20s and mid-$30s for much of the year.

Then, after a slew of recent deals, the stock jumped from $28.13 on July 8 to a 52-week high of $63.63 last Wednesday. The company’s stock closed at $58.25 on Friday.

QLogic attributed the jump to its strong first-quarter earnings, which more than doubled and beat analyst expectations. (Profits for the quarter ended June 28 rose to $4.8 million, or 52 cents a share, from $2.2 million, or 35 cents a share, a year earlier.)

The company has been concentrating its sales efforts and trying to stay focused on its emerging technologies, said Thomas Anderson, chief financial officer.

“We’re specifically targeting the high-end market--workstations and file servers, not the PC,” he said.

That’s turned out to be a smart approach, say analysts, as the low-end market has been flooded with excess product and slack sales orders.

“The company is winning because it offers the highest-performing [products] in a field that demands great performance,” said Michael Lins, senior analyst for semiconductor research at SG Cowen and Co. in Boston.

Analysts also attribute the stock boost to nearly 75 high-tech companies--including Dell Computer Corp. and Sun Microsystems--deciding to use QLogic’s technology designs.

“QLogic was there early and they were smart with their [technology] approach,” said Neil Cooper, an analyst with Cruttenden Roth Inc. “If things continue to go in this direction, [QLogic’s] stock is going to be huge.”

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.