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Xilinx, the multinational semiconductor manufacturer, has announced that its revenues for Q1 2002 were down 21 percent compared to the same period last year.
The company employs 360 people at an advanced R&D, engineering and operations facility at Citywest, Dublin. However, despite the downturn in its business, a company spokesperson said there would not be job losses in Ireland. "Xilinx has a policy that people will be laid off only as last resort," commented the spokesperson.
According to the spokesperson, the company still intended to increase its Irish workforce by 500. Xilinx also said that it expected its IEP41 million expansion of the Citywest facility, where most of the new workers will be employed, to be completed in 2002.
Xilinx's revenues for first fiscal quarter 2002, ending 29 June 2001, were USD289.3 million, down from USD364.9 for the same period last year. Operating income for Q1 decreased by 75 percent to USD30.3 million from USD121.4 million in the same period in fiscal 2001. The company's net income for the first quarter decreased by 69 percent to USD29 million from USD93.8 million in the first quarter of last year.
"The macroeconomic climate continues to be difficult for the semiconductor industry," said Wim Roelandts, Xilinx's president and chief executive officer. "Xilinx continues to be impacted by weakness in our primary end markets of communications, storage and servers and by excess inventory levels held by our major customers."
Roelandts added that the company's gross margins declined by 51 percent for the quarter ending in June. This, he said, was because new products, which have lower gross margins, continued to increase as a percentage of the company's revenues. Sales from older products were "particularly weak" during the quarter, according to Roelandts, accounting for 75 percent of the sequential revenue decline throughout that period.
Roelandts did point to one "positive note" for Xilinx. Sales from the highest density member of its newly introduced Virtex-II family of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) surpassed USD1 million in the June quarter, he said.
Xilinx established its facility in Ireland in 1995. An Irish-based design team recently pioneered the design of new microchips, which will be made using advanced 300mm silicon wafer technology.
The company is one of the world's leading suppliers of complete programmable logic solutions. The company designs and produces highly complex semiconductor chips capable of being programmed individually for use in a wide range of electronic systems. Xilinx also develops and provides the software tools necessary to programme these chips, as well as pre-defined system functions that customers load as software into the Xilinx programmable logic devices.
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