Cypress CEO T.J. Rodgers said, "Cypress had a great quarter. We put behind
us the manufacturing problem that caused a $0.02 loss in the fourth quarter of
1998, and then we delivered $0.09 in EPS, including the results of IC WORKS,
which we acquired effective April 1, 1999. In order to conform to SEC rules and
achieve the desired pooling accounting treatment for the IC WORKS transaction,
Cypress resold 4.7 million shares purchased during our 1998 buy-back program.
Ilbok Lee, IC WORKS former CEO, now runs the combined Cypress/IC WORKS
clock-chip business. That business will ship about $150 million per year in
revenue, making it the largest clock-chip business worldwide."
Rodgers continued, "Jeff Linden, the former VP and GM of Cypress' computer
products division, of which our clock business was a part, will now run
Cypress' Universal Serial Bus (USB) business, which is expected to ship over 20
million units in 1999."
Rodgers continued, "The memory products division was another significant
contributor to our $0.11 quarter-to-quarter jump in earnings per share. Our
memory group shipped $58.3 million in revenue during the quarter, its best
performance since the second quarter of 1996, and its pre-tax profitability
improved quarter-to-quarter by over $10 mi
llion. There are several reasons for the improvement:
-- Static RAM prices increased for the first time in the last seven
quarters due to:
-- a very modest decline in the prices of older commodity
products; and,
-- record sales of new static RAM products, 28% of total static
RAM revenue.
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