If Cree Chairman and CEO Chuck Swoboda was thinking a new product disclosure might stem off another run on shares Tuesday he was wrong.

Shares in LED manufacturer Cree (Nasdaq: CREE) plunged 10 percent to a 52-week low under $30 after its quarterly earnings report.

Shares fell to $29.89, down 10 percent from Tuesday’s close. The previous 52-week low was $30.10.

And how Cree shares have fallen – down from a 52-week high of $75.98. In fact, after each of its last three earnings report Cree shares have taken major hits in value. 

Cree disappointed investors with a profit of 24 cents per share – 10 below expectations – and an earnings forecast of 20-24 cents for the current quarter was well below expectations of analysts at 38 cents, as noted by Bloomberg news.

The result was a selling spree.

In prepared remarks for a conference call with analysts and in a Q&A later, Swoboda talked about the new bulb which is expected to hit stores soon. The lighting sector was the bright spot for Cree in earnings with revenues up more than 50 percent year-over-year. But LEDs overall remained soft, and Swoboda noted that Cree was especially hard hit by weak demand in China.

The grim news took the luster off the new bulb news.

“Yeah, so next generation bulb I’m not going to be able to reveal too much. That product is – obviously, there will be a fairly significant announcement when that thing hits the stores,” Swoboda said in the call. (News site SeekingAlpha provided the transcript.)

“What I could say is three pretty simple ideas, it’s going to be an even better — we believe it will be even a better lighting experience for our customers. We think it will look even more like a light bulb, which we know they like. And we think we’ll be offer it to them at a price that gets more people the ability to buy it. Probably any more than that and I’d be killing the marketing launch. So, we’ll just leave it at that for right. Stay tuned.”

Cree has bet its future on the reinvention of the light bulb, as it likes to say.

In fact, LED lighting demand is such that Swoboda said Cree is having to ramp up efforts to meet demand. 

“[W]e got a Lighting business that the entire business is up 51 percent year-over-year and I think that simplest way to say it is growing pains,” Swoboda said.

“So, you have – we’re trying to expand labor, we’re trying to add shifts. We’re getting into various supply chain challenges as we scale up that business and I think we’ve done a really good job over the last year keeping up with it.

“And last quarter I think the execution on average we had too many things that didn’t happen that we were planning on. So, there are things we have seen before, things we dealt with, we just have to go out now and fix them. So, I think they’re pretty straightforward execution issues. We just got to go do it.”