After-Hours Silver Lining for Sunpower?

SAN JOSE, Calif. (TheStreet) -- SunPower(SPWRA Quote) shares were up slightly in after-hours trading on Tuesday, which could be a silver lining on what had been a very cloudy day for the solar company.

The day began in panic-mode, with the market having already extracted a huge chunk from the share price, but the day ended with a general sense that the depreciation could make the company more attractive to some investors who thought it had been overvalued.

SunPower shares plummeted in Tuesday pre-market trading after news of accounting problems at its Philippines-based plant was made public by the company. The stock opened at $22, down from its previous day close of $27.

The market is hugely sensitive to any prospect of earnings restatement as it evokes memories of the Enron/World.com days, and there was a huge spike in volume at the market open today, with 370,000 shares in play -- but those levels quickly abated. The stock traded at its pre-market peg for most of the day, ending down almost 18.7%. It was back up almost 0.9% in after-hours trading.

Three analysts downgraded the stock this morning, but among the downgrade actions was a sentiment that is far from panicky. Mehdi Hosseini, analyst at FBR Capital Markets, said his decision to downgrade the company to market perform was a matter of risk management, as opposed to an expectation that these accounting problems would reveal widespread mismanagement.