There were encouraging news about its business situation as well, and Seagate is now rumored to be in talks to acquire the company.
CEO Ryan Petersen told analysts the next-generation Barefoot 3 controller is on TSMC's production lines and samples may become available in the coming weeks. Sample shipments should be taking place by August or September and full availability is scheduled for the fourth calendar quarter. Petersen said that Barefoot 3 "will support a significant performance increase over [OCZ's] current products". It integrates OCZ's 400 MHz Aragon processor to run "an SSD specific risk instruction set, allowing most instructions and branches to be executed in a single cycle." The executive promised "a world of new possibilities for game changing SSD solutions as it supports unprecedented levels of processing power."
Aside barefoot 3, OCZ said that it had almost $140 million in bookings in the second quarter and a revenue increase of 54 percent over the same quarter last year. A big portion of OCZ's sales came from the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 SSDs, which shipped more than 100,000 units during the quarter. However, the company said that the PSU business is problematic due to "headwinds in terms of both revenue and gross margins, as sales of desktop PCs which use these products continue to dwindle."
There was some speculation that OCZ may be acquired by Seagate in the near future. In fact, OCZ has been streamlining its business lately and has trimmed its quarterly loss to $6.3 million in CQ2, down from $9.1 million last year. OCZ's cash base has been cut more in half from the first quarter and now stands at just $43.2 million. OCZ's market cap has increased by almost 30 percent over the past week based on the acquisition rumors, and lifted the company's stock value to about $405 million.
Neither Seagate nor OCZ commented on the rumors.