AirTouch Communications Inc says it expects turnover growth of 49% this year, a continuation of last year’s pace: the company’s vice-president, Craig Farril, said cash flow growth would continue at last year’s pace of 47%, adding that Air Touch’s cellular subscriber rate would also continue growth at the same pace as last year; AirTouch added 104,000 cellular customers in the US in the first quarter and 533,000 since the year ago first quarter; it now has 1.6m subscribers; we see an explosion of demand, said Farril; last month AirTouch reported first quarter turnover of $367.2m, up from $276.2m last year, and it did $0.07 per share, compared with $0.06 in the 1994 quarter (CI No 2,649).
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Cisco Systems Inc president and chief executive John Chambers told the gathering that Cisco continues to target its turnover growth at the high-end of the industry’s growth range which currently stands at 30% to 35%: last year, Cisco’s turnover grew 54% to $1,240m, making it the largest company in the US networking equipment industry; Chambers confided that he believed Cisco’s largest challenge now was managing growth so that its people continue to act entrepreneurially, but said, We still want to grow.
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VLSI Technology Inc chief financial officer Greg Hinckley said the chip-maker and ARM RISC licensee was comfortable with Wall Street estimates of $1.30 to $1.40 per share for 1995; last year VLSI earned $0.85 per share; and he agreed with forecasts that VLSI turnover will grow 20% to 25% this year; the company told the conference that the market for application specific integrated circuits was booming, driven by needs in the computer, entertainment and communications markets; Don Ciffone, general manager of VLSI Products, stepped up to say that the market was worth about $12,000m and that the market for cell based products, or pre-designed blocks of chips, was particularly promising; about two thirds of VLSI’s business was in these cell-based products – a market segment that’s expected to grow 25% over the next three years.
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Weitek Corp told delegates at the conference that its next generation family of personal computer graphics products, code-named Enterprise will incorporate a unified memory architecture: the merger of the graphics frame buffer with main system memory enables the lowest-cost implementation for personal computers, while providing the performance and features of more costly discrete 64-bit graphics chips, says Weitek adding that the technology eliminates the need for a separate bank of frame buffer memory.
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LSI Logic Corp says it is aiming for revenue growth of 75% a year and growing faster than its market: the company’s executives told the conference that they were comfortable with Wall Street estimates of earnings of $3.15 per share in 1995; last year, LSI Logic earned $1.81 per share; Brian Halla, executive vice-president said that the company’s Coreware products, chip technology of re-usable blocks of silicon code, had almost no competition in the multimedia, networking and telecommunications market; Halla said its design system enabled customers to put more transitors and more gates of logic on a chip, enabling them to build extremely complex electronic systems.
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Cypress Semiconductor has revised its expectations for revenue growth this year to significantly above the 38% previously projected, Dan McCranie, vice-president of sales and marketing told the conference: the market for static memory chips, one of Cypress’ major products, was booming as demand for more and more cache grows, and he saw it growing 60% to 80% this year and continuing that growth rate through 1996; he said that compared with an estimated 30% to 40% growth rate in the market last year; McCranie said Intel Corp would become Cypress’s largest customer in the second half of this year because of a static RAM contract it has with the company; and the firm’s other products, programmable logic chips, were also doing well,
because of growth in the underlying markets, he said.
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Attending the Hambrecht & Quist conference on behalf of National Semiconductor Corp, president and chief executive Gilbert Amelio said the company expects revenue growth by the autumn to hit the high teens and revenues in the current quarter should grow in the high single digits year-over-year, and should grow 12% to 15% from the previous quarter, ended February: Amelio said that demand is very good for its products, chiefly analogue and mixed-signal semiconductor devices, and he was particularly pleased about demand for the company’s proprietary products overtaking that for commodity products; Amelio said the company had set higher goals for its fiscal 1996, which begins in June, including boosting gross margins to 45% from 40% currently and investing in a new semiconductor fabrication plant that is expected to cost $800m and produce $2,000m in revenue when it comes on line in 1997; there is still no site for the new facility and NatSemi plans to expand existing plants until then.
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Bay Networks Inc continues to project revenue growth of about 35% for 1995 on 1004 turnover of $384m: it says its router business should improve over the rest of the year from the first quarter performance.
