Marvell Posted Record Revenue and Beat Its Own Guidance Midpoint by $39 Million. It Said It Was Raising Two Years of Outlook Without Putting the Numbers in the Release.

by Marcus Donnelly · August 28, 2026

Market Reaction Reporter, Earnings Dispatch

Marvell Technology reported results for its fiscal 2027 second quarter after Thursday's close, for a period the company says ended August 1, 2026. In its own release, distributed through Business Wire, Marvell put net revenue at $2,739.3 million, which it described as a record and which compares with $2,006.1 million in the year-ago quarter ended August 2, 2025 -- growth of about 37 percent. All of the figures in this paragraph are the company's self-reported numbers.

The share price went the other way. Reuters, in a report carried by MarketScreener timestamped 4:16 p.m. EDT Thursday and modified at 7:11 p.m., said the stock slid more than 6 percent after hours. A Yahoo Finance digest published at 6:18 a.m. EDT on Friday said shares had fallen 7.9 percent in pre-market trading. An AOL item published Friday at 1:54 p.m. UTC -- 9:54 a.m. ET -- said the stock was down nearly 6 percent in what it called recent trading. The US market is open as this piece is filed and there is no Friday close for Marvell or for anything else; every reaction figure here is an intraday or pre-market observation carrying the timestamp of the page that reported it.

The result against the company's own guide

Marvell's release states plainly that the $2.739 billion figure came in $39.0 million above the midpoint of the guidance the company gave on May 27, 2026. Backing that $39.0 million out puts the implied guidance midpoint at roughly $2,700.3 million. That is a beat against the company's own prior number of about 1.4 percent.

Against outside estimates the margin was similar and the numbers were not identical from one compiler to the next. The AOL item said the results narrowly exceeded a Visible Alpha analyst consensus of $2.71 billion in revenue and 93 cents in adjusted earnings per share. The Reuters report cited estimates of $2.71 billion and 92 cents but, in the version read for this article, did not name the compiler behind them. Consensus figures differ by compiler because the contributing analyst panels differ; the two adjusted-EPS figures above are one cent apart and should not be treated as a single number.

GAAP and non-GAAP, and the $557.9 million between them

Marvell reported GAAP net income of $308.0 million and GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.33. On a non-GAAP basis it reported net income of $865.9 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.94. The GAAP figure is roughly 35 percent of the adjusted one. The $557.9 million difference in net income is fully itemised in the company's reconciliation: $594.6 million of pre-tax special items less $36.7 million on the line the release labels other income tax effects, struck at an 11.0 percent non-GAAP tax rate. The itemised lines sum to that $594.6 million, and $594.6 million less $36.7 million is exactly the $557.9 million separating the two net income figures.

The pre-tax adjustments break down as $326.2 million of stock-based compensation, $214.9 million of amortisation of acquired intangible assets, $52.0 million on the line the release labels change in fair value of contingent consideration liability, net of forward stock purchase contract, $4.5 million on a residual line the release labels only as other and does not break out further, and a $3.0 million credit on the line labelled restructuring charges (gains), which reduces the total. Stock-based compensation and intangible amortisation together account for $541.1 million of the $594.6 million.

The same split runs through the margin lines. Marvell put GAAP gross margin at 53.1 percent and non-GAAP gross margin at 58.9 percent. GAAP operating income was $459.7 million, a 16.8 percent operating margin; non-GAAP operating income was $1,003.2 million, a 36.6 percent margin. The two operating margins are 19.8 percentage points apart.

Where the revenue came from

Data center revenue was $2,171.5 million, which the company said rose 46 percent from a year earlier and 18 percent sequentially, and which works out to 79 percent of total revenue. The communications and other bucket was $567.8 million, up 10 percent year over year but down 3 percent from the prior quarter. Chairman and chief executive Matt Murphy said in the release: "Marvell delivered record second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $2.739 billion, up 37% year over year, driven by continued strong demand across our Data Center portfolio, where revenue growth accelerated to 46% year over year."

The third-quarter guide, and the gross-margin line inside it

For the fiscal third quarter ending October 31, 2026, Marvell guided revenue to $3,150 million plus or minus 5 percent, a range of $2,992.5 million to $3,307.5 million. The midpoint is 15.0 percent above the $2,739.3 million just reported. GAAP diluted EPS is guided at $0.53 plus or minus $0.05 and non-GAAP diluted EPS at $1.10 plus or minus $0.05, so the gap between the two measures at their midpoints is $0.57, slightly narrower than the $0.61 gap in the quarter just closed. Guided GAAP operating expenses of about $1,015 million sit roughly $360 million above the guided non-GAAP figure of about $655 million.

One line inside that guide is a step down rather than up. Non-GAAP gross margin is guided to 57.5 to 58.5 percent, a midpoint of 58.0 percent against the 58.9 percent Marvell just reported -- a sequential decline of roughly 90 basis points on revenue guided 15 percent higher. GAAP gross margin is guided to 52.9 to 53.9 percent.

Beyond the quarter, the release itself carries no annual figures. The only thing in it that speaks to fiscal 2027 or fiscal 2028 as a whole is a sentence in Matt Murphy's statement: "Given this strength, we are again raising our revenue outlook for both fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028 compared with the guidance we provided last quarter." That is a raise asserted without a number attached to it. The guidance tables in the release stop at the third quarter.

The numeric versions circulating on Friday are second-hand accounts of the earnings call rather than anything in the document Marvell distributed through Business Wire. Reuters, as carried by MarketScreener, put the fiscal 2027 expectation at approximately $12 billion against a prior figure of about $11.5 billion, and the fiscal 2028 target at approximately $18 billion against about $16.5 billion; a Yahoo Finance digest carried the same two rounded numbers. This article does not treat $12 billion or $18 billion as company-issued guidance, because the company did not issue them in the release.

Taking the rounded $12 billion at face value against the $2,417.8 million first quarter and the $2,739.3 million second quarter -- $5,157.1 million for the first half, per the release -- leaves roughly $6.84 billion for the back half; with the third quarter guided to a $3.15 billion midpoint, that implies a fourth quarter somewhere near $3.7 billion. The $12 billion is a rounded number relayed by Reuters, not a company-issued annual guide, so the implied fourth-quarter figure is an arithmetic approximation resting on a secondary source rather than a Marvell projection.

Reuters also supplied the context that appears to have framed the reaction: it reported that Marvell last week signed a custom chip agreement with Alphabet's Google that could bring in $120 billion of revenue through fiscal 2033 and could leave Google holding a stake of up to $12.2 billion, and that Murphy indicated significant Google-related revenue would not arrive until fiscal 2029 -- later than some investors had expected. The October 6 investor day is not a Reuters detail: Murphy names it in the release itself, saying the company looks forward to "sharing Marvell's long-term strategy for enabling the continued expansion of AI infrastructure at our Investor Day on October 6th, 2026."

On cash, the release put operating cash flow at $605.5 million for the quarter, with $200.0 million spent on share repurchases and $53.9 million paid in dividends.

For the last completed session, Thursday, August 27, the Associated Press recorded the S&P 500 up 55.29 points, or 0.7 percent, at 7,730.99; the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 105.56 points, or 0.2 percent, at 53,569.44; the Nasdaq composite up 411.16 points, or 1.6 percent, at 26,541.35; and the Russell 2000 up 8.44 points, or 0.3 percent, at 3,014.34. Friday's session has not closed.