ALTR ($21-$23-$21) PE=65 Cap=$8.35Bil reports sharp decline in second-quarter net
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(Adds second-quarter guidance, stock price, other details)
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 22 (Reuters) - Altera Corp., a maker of semiconductors that can be programmed by customers for specific uses, on Monday reported first-quarter net income and revenue that plunged from last year but sales increased over the fourth quarter, spurred by shipments of new products.
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San Jose, California-based Altera (NasdaqNM:ALTR - news) said net income fell to $19 million, or 5 cents a share, from $63 million, or 16 cents, a year ago. Revenue fell to $172 million from $287.4 million, but gained 6 percent from $162.5 million in the fourth quarter.
Analysts had forecast the company to post a profit of 4 cents a share, within a range of 3 cents to 5 cents, on revenue of $169 million according to Wall Street tracking firm Thomson Financial/First Call.
``This quarter's (sequential) top-line improvement reflects a sharp increase in new product sales,'' said John Danne, Altera's president and chief executive in a statement.
In addition to better-than-expected results in the quarter, Altera also forecast that second-quarter sales would rise by 4 percent to 6 percent from the prior quarter, citing ongoing stronger sales of new products.
Altera joins the ranks of semiconductor companies that are starting to forecast modest sequential growth in the second calendar quarter. Analysts expect 2002 to be largely a year of recovery for the $140 billion chip industry, with global sales rising 6 percent from 2001. Chip sales last year plunged more than 30 percent.
Those new products, which Altera has introduced in the last year, are paying off. Fully 20 percent of the quarter's revenue came from those new products, said Nathan Sarkisian, Altera's chief financial officer on a conference call to discuss the results.
For about a year, Sarkisian said that customers, which are in the telecommunications, networking, computing, storage and industrial sectors, had been buying fewer chips from Altera than their demand warranted, because those customers still had inventories of chips that had built up last year.
Now, however, Sarkisian said that customers are buying chips and components at a rate that is about equal with their consumption, indicating that customers are holding their inventories steady.
``Inventories are now at desired levels,'' Sarkisian said.
Shares of Altera fell 75 cents to $21.65 on Nasdaq. The stock has risen 2 percent year-to-date, compared with a 3.7 percent rise in the shares of its principal competitors Xilinx Inc. (NasdaqNM:XLNX - news) in the same time period.
Last week, Xilinx said fiscal fourth-quarter net income before one-time items fell to $43.4 million, or 12 cents a share, from $65.7 million, or 19 cents, a year earlier. Revenue fell to $273.5 million from $407 million.
Those results were ahead of the 9 cents a share analysts had forecast. Xilinx also forecast that revenue in the current quarter would rise 6 percent to 8 percent from the just-completed fourth quarter. |
