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According to Xilinx, which has an international R&D, engineering and operations facility in Dublin, third quarter revenues for the quarter ended 29 December 2001, which it calls Q3 2002, fell by 49 percent to USD228.1 million from USD450.1 million for the same period a year before.
However, when one-time items were included, Xilinx recorded a net profit compared to a loss in Q3 2001. Before one-time items, earnings fell to USD23.5 million, or USD0.07 a share, from USD109.3 million, or USD0.31, a year ago. This was still enough though to beat analysts' forecasts. According to Thomson Financial/First Call Survey, analysts had expected earnings of around USD0.04 a share and revenues of USD213 million, while on 10 December Xilinx said it anticipated Q3 revenues of around USD210 million.
Xilinx's president and chief executive, Wim Roelandts, welcomed the results. "The December quarter was marked by a return to sequential revenue growth after three quarters of decline. Customer ordering patterns improved as inventories were depleted," he said in a statement. In a conference call, Roelandts said that the company expected "low single-digit sequential growth" in Q4 sales over the third quarter.
The maker of programmable logic devices (PLD) also reported a slight increase in its European sales from the last quarter with the region accounting for 20 percent of its worldwide revenues compared to 19 percent in Q2 2002. However, overall sales in Europe fell by 44 percent from Q3 2001. North America continues to be Xilinx's biggest market with over 50 percent of its total revenues.
Xilinx's continued re-bound will be good news for the company's 300 plus employees in Ireland and a spokesperson for the company told ElectricNews.Net that it was still on schedule to complete its EUR52 million expansion programme at its Citywest facility by mid-2002.
The company had also said that it planned to recruit an additional 500 staff during the year, the majority of whom would be housed in the new facility. However, the spokesperson said that given the current economic climate it might have to rein in those plans. "Our expansions plans will be more modest and although Xilinx is committed to bringing in that level of new employees it may take longer to achieve than previously anticipated," the spokesperson commented.
Xilinx has traded in a 52-week range of USD19.52 to USD59.25 hitting its all-time low in mid-September. Since then though its share prices has bounced back and in trading on Nasdaq on Thursday it was up USD1.78, or 4.3 percent, to close at USD43.06.
Xilinx designs and produces semiconductor chips capable of being programmed individually for use in a wide range of electronic systems. The company also develops and provides the software tools necessary to programme these chips, as well as predefined system functions that customers load as software into Xilinx's programmable logic devices. It has around 42 percent share of the global programmable logic device (PLD) market.
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