Sigma Has Road Show Designs

Sigma Designs, a maker of PC-DVD upgrade kits, will head to New York, Boston and Philadelphia next week to educate fund managers about its MPEG chips, one shareholder says. The chips compress and decompress digital audio and video signals.

The California company's conference call this week, led by CEO Thinh Tran, revealed that Sigma (SIGM) is winning business from C-Cube Microsystems' (CUBE) largest digital video disk customer, Creative Technologies (CREAF). "This effectively gives Sigma Designs a 100 percent market share in the PC-DVD upgrade kit market," says shareholder Glenn Holbert.

The kits let folks view Hollywood movies and video on their computer screens and television sets.

Holbert, who says Sigma Designs shares have languished amid virtually no Wall Street coverage of the company, has a new MPEG-2 chip that has "an excellent chance to be included in a number of set-top box configurations by various OEMs."

The company's fourth-quarter sales rose 33 percent to $13 million from the year-ago quarter. The loss was $1.4 million, or 10 cents a share. The company posted about a $200,000 operating profit last quarter.  Matsushita and IBM intend to use the tiny company's REALmagic DVD decoder for their DVD upgrade kits.

Sigma shares at 5 3/4 on Nasdaq give the company a market worth of about $82 million, or two times last fiscal year's sales of $43 million. We last wrote about the company in November, when the market cap was $35 million. See the original column.

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