Altera Reports First Quarter Results
Wednesday April 21, 4:15 pm ET
Sales Increase 12% Sequentially
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2004--Altera Corporation (Nasdaq:ALTR - News) today announced first quarter sales of $242.9 million, up 12% from the fourth quarter of 2003, and 25% from the first quarter of 2003. Sales of the company's new products grew 32% sequentially.
First quarter net income was $58.8 million, $0.15 per diluted share, up 95% versus net income of $30.1 million, $0.08 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2003. Gross margin was 68.8% for the first quarter of 2004 versus 67.1% for the first quarter of 2003. Gross margin included a 150 basis point ($3.6 million) benefit in the first quarter of 2004 and a 470 basis point ($9.1 million) benefit in the first quarter of 2003 resulting from the sale of inventory previously written down in 2001.
Altera repurchased 2.3 million shares of its common stock during the quarter at a cost of $51.6 million and ended the quarter with $1.1 billion in cash and short-term investments.
"This has been another quarter with outstanding growth from our new products. Sales of Cyclone(TM) devices continue to ramp, with one million units shipped in this quarter, bringing our cumulative shipments to 2 million units. Cyclone devices are the clear leader among the newest generation low-cost FPGAs. In the high-density market, the combination of Stratix® devices and our HardCopy® solution continues to draw new customers to Altera, adding to our new product momentum," said John Daane, president and CEO. "We announced two next generation products during the quarter - both based on truly unique Altera architectures. Our 90-nm Stratix II devices use the industry's first adaptable FPGA architecture and are the industry's largest and fastest chips, offering performance and capabilities previously only available in ASICs and ASSPs. In addition, the MAX® II CPLD family signals the arrival of a radically different CPLD architecture. The MAX II family provides a superior solution for today's CPLD customers and the opportunity for Altera to set a new standard for the industry."
Altera continued to advance its leadership position in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions.
Altera's HardCopy Stratix structured ASIC has been named EDN's Innovation of the Year winner. Altera received the same award in 2003 for its Stratix family of FPGAs. These awards, which honor outstanding products in the electronics industry, are the result of selection by EDN's technical editors and online voting by EDN's worldwide readers. Altera's second straight win in this category reaffirms the company's ongoing success in delivering innovative solutions and highlights the company's leadership in the rapidly emerging structured ASIC market.
In order to capture the full performance potential of the advanced 90-nm process, Altera's newly announced Stratix II family was developed with the industry's first adaptable FPGA architecture. More efficient than previous approaches, the unique 90-nm based Stratix II architecture enables the Stratix II family to offer more than double the logic density with performance 50% faster than first-generation Stratix devices. The combination of 90-nm process benefits and this unique architecture also delivers dramatically lower pricing for Altera's customers. As a result, the Stratix II family is an attractive alternative to many of the more costly and less flexible ASICs, ASSPs, microprocessors, and digital signal processing (DSP) solutions traditionally employed in today's electronic systems.
Building on more than a decade of CPLD leadership and innovation, Altera has announced the MAX II family, which offers customers half the cost, one-tenth the power, four times the density, and twice the performance of the previous MAX generation. In contrast to traditional CPLDs, MAX II devices are built on a 0.18-micron embedded flash-based process utilizing a look-up-table architecture. With a resulting die size one quarter that of competing CPLDs, the MAX II family delivers, in a single reprogrammable chip, nonvolatile instant-on capability at dramatically lower prices. The MAX II family is now fully supported in Altera's Quartus® II software. Initial devices are expected to ship mid-year.
Recent benchmarking analysis confirms that Altera's newest generation products outperform the competition and deliver unrivalled performance to Altera's customers. These results are a direct consequence of a customer focused development process and the creation of innovative architectures that leverage the full performance potential available at the industry's most advanced process nodes. Comparing Stratix II, MAX II, and Cyclone performance against the leading competitive offerings demonstrate a consistent and significant Altera performance advantage. Compared to other high-density FPGAs, Stratix II devices outperform Xilinx's Virtex-II Pro by on average 50%. Among high-volume FPGAs, Altera's 130-nm based Cyclone devices outperform Xilinx's 90-nm Spartan-3 devices by on average more than 70%. In the CPLD category, the MAX II family outperforms Lattice's ispXPLD CPLDs by on average 80% and Xilinx's CoolRunner devices by on average 50%. Comparisons are based on customer design suites ranging from 50 to 100 designs. Complete details are available at www.altera.com.
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