POET stock crashes 47% in a single session on April 27, sitting right now at $7.95, down from $15.10 the day before. Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) sent written notice canceling all purchase orders it inherited from Celestial AI, a company it acquired back in February, and those orders had all gone to POET Technologies (NASDAQ: POET). The Marvell-POET deal, which just last week looked like a major win for POET, fell apart over allegations of a confidentiality breach. For investors watching the stock price drop off a cliff and the stock analysis flip overnight from bullish to deeply uncertain, the question right now is simple: is this a buy or a trap.

The POET stock crash started with an interview. POET CFO Thomas Mika appeared on Stocktwits TV last week and confirmed, for the first time publicly, that the company had a purchase order tied to Marvell Technology through its Celestial AI unit. He also suggested the order level grew well above the $5 million threshold the company previously disclosed, and that shipments could start as early as next quarter. The stock more than doubled on the back of those comments.

Thomas Mika, CFO of POET Technologies, in an interview with Stocktwits:

“We’ve got a purchase order from them that we’re gonna ship against and we intend to continue that relationship and build it over time.”

He also went into some detail about what exactly POET supplies. In the same interview, Mika said:

“We’re a supplier to Marvell now that they’ve acquired Celestial AI, who has been a customer of ours for a couple of years. And what we supply to Celestial AI are light sources – high-bandwidth, multi-frequency, high-power light sources that light up the photonic fabric that Celestial AI talks about as being the communication device between GPUs and one GPU and another GPU, a GPU and a memory device.”

Marvell took those comments as a violation of the NDA tied to the purchase order. On April 23, it sent a formal written cancellation notice covering all purchase orders POET had from Celestial AI, including the initial production-unit orders that go back to April 2023. The POET technologies stock crash followed days later once the news went public.

The Marvell stock price today sits at $158.21, a 3.71% drop on the session. That hurts on the day, but it barely puts a dent in a stock that is still up 76.6% year-to-date and sitting near its 52-week high of $163.45. Marvell also clocked 35 separate moves greater than 5% over the past year, so a single-day 4% slide is nothing out of the ordinary for this name. The Marvell-POET deal fallout also barely registered against Marvell’s broader AI story. Just a week ago, Marvell stock gained 6.9% on reports it entered talks with Google to co-develop two custom AI chips.

Some retail traders on Stocktwits did not buy the confidentiality breach explanation at all. One user wrote:

“Someone please correct me if I may be wrong here. $POET had a deal with Celestial. Marvell acquired Celestial with the POET deal already in place. Marvell wanted to do optical in-house and bought their own optical company. Marvell didn’t necessarily want the revenue going to POET when they could just keep all the dough for themselves.”

Source: Watcher Guru