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Actel has, within the last 18 months, made some simply brilliant business decisions. They have materially affected both their near, and long term prospects. The decisions combined with some good fortune, and the inherent characteristics of their devices have materially affected operations as sales and earning were up dramatically for their most recient quarter. The reasons for the lack of price volitility are as follows:
1. Last year Actel bought TI's FPGA bus. thus eliminating their only pin for pin competitor (no more downward price pressure).
2. Unknown to those at TI who made the decision to sell this "little" group; many of the TI sales people were expending great effort and creating lots of new design wins. Actel got all of these for free with the purchase; many of these sockets will move into production this year, and provide a step increase in demand.
3. Actel's devices are one-time-programmable, and expensive.
4. As of 1/96 Altera exited the Military FPGA business. Altera had lots of pre-production sockets that must now be redesigned. Actel is agressivly persuing and winning many of these "mature" (they are much closer to production than a new design would be) sockets. Actel has successfully initiated an effort to convert all of these sockets that can no longer be serviced by Altera.
5. Military devices are very expensive, and as mentioned in #3 above the devices are still one-time-programmable.
Some other reasons, are ease of routability, 100% usage is not uncommon vs. 60-70% for Xilinx, and Altera; new development software; agressive sales; all these combine to assure large increases in both sales and profitability within the forseeible future (next 4-8 quarters). I know of one customer alone who will use 6-10 Million dollars in the next 3-4 years. I don't know what the price should be, but it has to be closer to 40 than 15 just because of the items listed here. |
