Roth Capital Partners analyst Arnab Chanda this morning lowered his rating on several chip stocks to “Hold” from “Buy,” citing the risk of a modest inventory build given high projected margins and growth at Intel (INTC), Marvell (MRVL), Nvidia (NVDA) and others.

“Overall, we’re getting the sense that lead times in the semi industry have gone up a lot. There may be orders that are ‘phantom,’ or double-orders,” Chanda told me in a phone conversation this morning.

“Second, the PC end markets are probably flat year over year, but look at Intel’s [projected Q4 revenue] growth of 23 percent, Marvell’s 50 percent, Nvidia’s 80 percent–that just seems like there’s some “exuberance” embedded in that,” says Chanda.

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Shares of both Seagate (STX) and Western Digital (WDC) are getting battered on fears that the hard-drive sector could once again soon find itself with a glut of supply.

At least in part, the Street is reacting to this morning’s downgrade of Marvell (MRVL) by Barclays Capital, which–as I noted earlier–was in response to indications from Taiwanese component makers of a slowdown PC demand. Barclays chip analyst Romit Shah wrote that “every company that we met with [in Taiwan] indicated that PC order rates are slowing into the back-to-school season.”

Meanwhile, Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar today notes new data on drive production that he thinks raises ominous clouds for Seagate in particular. Kumar says data from Techno Systems Research, a Japan-based market research firm, find that hard-drive unit production was down 18 percent sequentially in the March quarter, comparable to a 15 percent decline in PC shipments.

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Semiconductor companies are planning sharp production cuts for both Q4 2008 and Q1 2009, according to a report today by Craig Berger, chip analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey. He says that PC chip firms are seeing “significant production weakness,” as are communications IC producers–and that semiconductor companies are adjusting their own output accordingly.

Here’s a rundown on Berger’s outlook for production in the next few quarters from key chip companies; what he’s measuring here are wafer starts, or a little more roughly, units:

• Broadcom (BRCM): He sees production down 13 percent in Q4 from Q3, worse than his previous estimate of down eight percent; for Q1 he sees a further 17 percent cut.
• Marvell (MRVL): For Q4, down 18 percent, versus previous estimate of down 13 percent. For Q1, down another 10 percent.
• Texas Instruments (TXN): For Q4, production down 18 percent, no change; with Q1 down another 20 percent.

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Marvell (MVRL) shares are down sharply again today, pressured this morning by Deutsche Bank analyst Arnab Chanda, who cut his rating on the stock to Hold from Buy. He cut his target price on the stock to $15 from $20.

“Following checks with industry contacts, we believe Marvell is not likely to see significant upside in the next six months, both due to weakness in Europe and Asia, as well as slower-than-expected product ramps” at Research In Motion (RIMM) and Seagate (STX), he wrote in a research note. “While we recognize that the company detailed some of these issues in their recent conference call, we still believe that it is prudent to move to the sidelines, given estimates could get cut” into fiscal Q4.

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Marvell (MRVL) said in a statement issued to Tech Trader Daily late Wednesday afternoon that it did not provide investors with new guidance in its one-on-one meetings with investors at the Citigroup technology conference earlier in the day, but that its statements were consistent with its concerns about the softening economy.

The statement was in response to a post I wrote earlier in the day about a deep slide in Marvell’s stock price. In that post, I wrote that “trading sources say [Marvell CFO Clyde] Hosein told investors in one-on-one presentations at the conference not to model any sequential growth in revenue for the January and April quarters due to the soft economy.”

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