First quarter net income of $63.0 million declined 39% from the fourth quarter’s pro forma income and 16% from the prior year’s first quarter. The company’s fourth quarter pro forma income excludes the one-time gain and other one-time charges and credits relating to the sale of the company’s 23% interest in WaferTech to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
First quarter sales of $287.4 million were down 22% from the previous quarter and up 5% from the same period last year. Sales of the company’s new products grew 22% sequentially, while sales of the company’s mainstream and mature products declined 22% and 28% respectively.
Including March stock transactions that settled in April, Altera repurchased 3.5 million shares of its common stock during the quarter at a cost of $90.8 million. Altera ended the quarter with a $925.9 million cash position.
The quarter’s results reflect the slowing end demand experienced by many of our customers, particularly in North America, and a continuation of the sharp industry-wide inventory correction that began in the previous quarter, said John Daane, president and CEO. We are reacting to this difficult economic environment with rigorous expense controls, but are pressing forward with our new product development efforts. I am pleased with the strength of our new product growth in the quarter, and more importantly with the continued market acceptance of our ExcaliburTM family of embedded processor solutions and with the initial market reactions to our newly introduced MercuryTM family of programmable ASSPs. We are leveraging these new products to win designs and position ourselves competitively for the return to growth in our end markets.
Altera continued to enhance its leadership position in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions:
Altera began shipping the Mercury device family, the world’s first programmable application-specific standard products (ASSPs). The Mercury family offers the only programmable devices available today that combine the functionality of a high-speed transceiver ASSP with a high-performance PLD core. The Mercury transceivers utilize clock data recovery (CDR) technology to offer industry-leading data rates of up to 1.25 Gbps and a total CDR bandwidth of 45 Gbps. For the first time, system designers have an effective PLD-based solution for key communication applications, including serial backplane, chip-to-chip, and line-side applications. Mercury devices support a wide variety of communications protocols including Gigabit Ethernet, RapidIO, and Fibre Channel.
