Navitas Semiconductor: Patent Attack Deepens a Steep Slide, but Long-Term Bets Remain Intact

Navitas Semiconductor loses 5.6% after Wolfspeed files patent-infringement suit; stock down 60% from May high, but GaN/SiC growth story remains intact.

A legal challenge from a rival has piled fresh pressure on Navitas Semiconductor shares, extending a sell-off that has already erased roughly three-fifths of the stock’s value from its May peak. The chipmaker lost another 5.6 percent on Friday, closing at €11.80 in Europe, after Wolfspeed filed a patent-infringement lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in Delaware.

The complaint targets several of Navitas’s core product families – the GaNFast, GaNSlim and GaNSafe transistors, as well as its GeneSiC MOSFETs and SiCPAK modules – alleging violations of patents including US 8.169.005 and US 10.998.418. Navitas has dismissed the claims as “unfounded,” arguing that its gallium-nitride and silicon-carbide technologies are the product of years of independent research. Management has vowed to defend its intellectual property vigorously, portraying the suit as a competitor’s attempt to gain an edge in the fast-growing wide-bandgap semiconductor market.

Friday’s drop adds to a brutal stretch for the stock. Over the past 30 days Navitas has lost 33.71 percent, and the weekly decline stands at almost 10 percent. The current market capitalisation of €2.98 billion sits nearly 60 percent below the 52-week high of €29.20 reached in late May. The 50-day moving average of €18.58 and the 100-day average of €13.29 both tower above the current price, underscoring the severity of the downtrend. The relative strength index of 33.9 points to territory nearing oversold, while annualised 30-day volatility of 121 percent signals that dramatic swings are likely to persist.

The selling pressure, however, has not dampened the structural thesis that drew many investors to Navitas in the first place. The company operates a fabless model, outsourcing manufacturing to keep capital costs low, and has pivoted decisively away from low-margin mobile and consumer chips towards high-power applications where gallium-nitride and silicon-carbide can replace traditional silicon. Demand from AI data centres, electric vehicles, solar inverters and energy-storage systems is expected to drive the GaN and SiC market at a compound annual growth rate above 25 percent through 2032, with the silicon-carbide power semiconductor segment alone forecast to reach $21.57 billion by 2034.

Yet profitability remains years off. Consensus among analysts is that Navitas will not turn a profit until at least 2029, a timeline that reflects heavy R&D spending and the long lead times needed to secure design wins against better-capitalised incumbents. The average analyst price target of €12.66 implies upside of about 7 percent from current levels – a modest vote of confidence that hints at deep divisions among market watchers.

The next major test comes at the end of July, when Navitas reports second-quarter results. Analysts expect a loss of $0.04 per share on revenue of roughly $9.97 million. Those numbers will show whether the company can maintain its operational focus on electric vehicles, AI data centres and renewables while fighting a legal battle that management insists will not disrupt day-to-day business. For now, the stock is pricing in considerable uncertainty about the timing of the payoff – but not necessarily about the destination.