UPDATE: Piper Jaffray Maintains Overweight, Lowers PT to $30 on Cree

Piper Jaffray reiterates its Overweight rating on Cree CREE but lowers its price target to $30 from $50 as it believes expectations on the company have been reset. Piper Jaffray says, " Given a 4th quarter in a row of missed guidance, we are taking a hatchet to our forward estimates for Cree. We lower our March quarter to the low end of guidance at $290M, gross margins of 35%, and $0.18 EPS. We cut our CY12/13 estimates in half by assuming flat margins YoY, not giving Cree the benefit of any of their cost reduction efforts. We now value Cree on CY13 at 20x P/E, (25x CY12 previously). ...In our view, increasing lighting segment margins, which were 100-200 bps below Cree's average, likely put a floor on margins near current levels." CREE closed at $23.33 per share on Tuesday.