Sivers Semiconductors: The Accounting Quirk Hiding Inside a 15% Share Price Slide

Sivers' Q2 loss includes a non-cash payroll charge; product revenue rose 18%, pipeline hit $1.2B, but short interest and sector selloff weigh on shares.

The 15 percent drop in Sivers Semiconductors' share price on Friday to €2.44 looked, at first glance, like a straightforward verdict on the company's second-quarter numbers. Dig deeper into the interim report, however, and a more nuanced picture emerges — one in which a non-cash accounting item did much of the damage to the headline figures, while the underlying business quietly moved in the opposite direction.

A Swedish Payroll Anomaly Distorts the EBITDA Picture

The company's adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter came in at minus 35.5 million Swedish kronor. Buried within that figure is a 42.9 million krona charge related to employer social security contributions — a non-cash expense that arose not from operational weakness but from the dramatic appreciation of Sivers' own share price during the period. The stock climbed from 10.71 to 63.15 kronor over the quarter, triggering the charge under Sweden's rules for share-based employee compensation programs.

Strip that item out, and the operating story looks markedly healthier. Product revenue rose 18 percent year-on-year on a currency-adjusted basis, even as total net sales slipped 12 percent to 53.8 million kronor. Management attributed the top-line decline to a deliberate scaling back of NRE (non-recurring engineering) activities as customer programs transition into production — a shift that aligns with the company's stated ambition to become a product-driven business rather than a services-heavy one.

A Sector-Wide Selloff Compounds the Pressure

The share price weakness cannot be blamed on the quarterly figures alone. The same Friday saw the broader semiconductor and optics complex come under heavy selling pressure, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF losing 3 percent and names like Applied Optoelectronics, Lumentum, and Coherent falling between 5 and 6 percent. The trigger was an apparent cooling of the AI hardware trade that had previously lifted the entire sector.

Notably, Sivers' stock actually rose 2.26 percent immediately after the interim report was published. The subsequent slide appears to have been driven more by the sector-wide sentiment shift than by any negative read on the company's own results.

A Heavily Shorted Stock Meets a Fresh Capital Infusion

The recent turbulence has been amplified by positioning. Several new public short positions were disclosed roughly a month ago, including one from Arrowstreet Capital, and the share price has since fallen 29.3 percent. Citadel Securities has reportedly dropped off the list of public short sellers, while Arrowstreet and D. E. Shaw remain active. That short interest, combined with the equity raise, helps explain the extreme volatility — the stock's annualized 30-day volatility stands at a staggering 169 percent.

On the balance sheet front, Sivers has taken decisive action. The company raised 825 million SEK through a share issuance and converted a $12 million convertible loan into equity, moves that bolster its financial position after a period of strain. The fresh capital provides runway to continue the pivot toward product sales, though the market will likely scrutinize any future capital measures while adjusted EBITDA remains negative.

A Pipeline That Keeps Growing

The most compelling counterweight to the near-term noise is the order pipeline, which expanded to $1.2 billion by July — a 268 percent increase from the end of 2025. That figure represents the company's long-term growth potential, assuming it can convert those orders into actual revenue.

The stock currently trades about 38 percent below its 50-day moving average of €3.94, reflecting how much momentum has faded since the first-half surge. Yet it remains far above the 52-week low of €0.2650 hit in March, underscoring the extraordinary range of price movement over the past year. With an RSI of 37.2, some technical indicators suggest the selling may have been overdone in the short term, though that alone does not signal a trend reversal.

For investors, the central tension is clear: a rapidly expanding pipeline and strategic progress in silicon photonics on one side, and accounting distortions, heavy short interest, and a still-unprofitable operating model on the other. The gap between the operational reality and the reported figures will likely keep demanding explanation in the quarters ahead.