AUTOMOTIVE

Cray Inc. (NASDAQ:CRAY) designs, builds and sells high-performance vector processor and general-purpose parallel computer systems. When reporting its fourth quarter results last month, Cray stated that it planned to grow revenue to about $300 million in 2004, which was below what some analysts were expecting. The company has experienced some recent downward revisions from analysts for the year ending December 2004, and its earnings estimates for that period have moved lower by about 11 cents, or -23%, over the past seven trading days. But in spite of this, Cray put together a solid fourth quarter, with earnings, excluding items, of 9 cents per share that matched the consensus on revenue that improved by +71%. It also stated that its outlook for 2004 and 2005 is promising, as it plans to introduce two new products. While the future may be encouraging for Cray, it may be best right now to delay a position and watch for its earnings estimates to gain more upward momentum.