New York, Jan 8, 2026, 14:17 EST — Regular session
- SIMO falls about 10% after an early spike to $123
- Tech and storage-linked stocks ease as traders brace for Friday U.S. payrolls
- Focus shifts to Silicon Motion’s Jan. 13 Needham webcast for fresh signals
Silicon Motion Technology Corp shares fell about 10% on Thursday, giving back a chunk of a sharp two-day run in the Nasdaq-listed storage chip name. The stock was down 9.9% at $109.10 in afternoon trading, after touching $123 earlier in the session.
The drop came as tech shares slipped more broadly, with traders looking ahead to Friday’s U.S. payrolls report after jobless claims rose modestly. Storage names also weakened; SanDisk fell about 10% while Western Digital and Seagate lost about 9% each. “Investors might be repositioning their holdings, so tech stocks are underperforming,” said Joe Saluzzi, partner and co-founder at Themis Trading. 1
The selling followed a burst of optimism earlier this week after Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang used a CES keynote in Las Vegas to talk up a new layer of storage technology. “Capex estimates … are going to be revised higher again,” Argent Capital portfolio manager Jed Ellerbroek told Reuters — capex is short for capital spending. 2
Silicon Motion jumped 12.4% on Tuesday to close at $105.21 and rallied again in the following session before Thursday’s slide cut into those gains. Zacks Equity Research, writing on Nasdaq.com, said the company is expected to earn $1.31 per share on revenue of about $260.6 million in its next report. 3
Silicon Motion sells NAND flash controllers — chips that steer data stored on flash memory — for solid-state drives and other storage products. Its parts end up in smartphones, tablets and PCs, according to its Reuters profile. 4
The company said earlier this week it will present at the Needham Growth Conference on Jan. 13, with a webcast scheduled for 8:00 a.m. ET. Silicon Motion also listed investor meetings through March, including events hosted by Susquehanna and Loop Capital. 5
Thursday’s pullback shoved SIMO back toward the $110 area after the stock gapped down at the open. A break below Tuesday’s $105 close would put it back where the rally started, and the tone could turn quickly again.
But the week’s swings show how fast the trade can flip once buyers step back. Any sign that demand for client and enterprise drives is softening — or that inventories are building — would test the story behind this week’s run.
