As quarterly earnings have been announced over the last couple of weeks, chipmakers have been hit hard. Because semiconductor companies, particularly those in Japan, produce the basic parts that make our cellphones, portable navigation devices, and televisions tick, any cutback in production down the supply chain directly, and due to lower profit margins, most drastically affects them.
In the past couple of days, Qualcomm, STMicro, and Texas Instruments have all announced big drops in income earned. And the coal burning, slow chugging, economic train continues.
Here’s a roundup of some of the semiconductor disasters of the past few days:
Broadcom: Q4 revenues of $1.13 billion beat Wall Street’s $1.07 billion expectation, but non-GAAP earnings of $0.08 per share were well below the Street’s $0.27. The company is also planning an unspecified number of job cuts, salary freezes, and other cost-cutting measures. Looking into Q1, things don’t look good.
Toshiba: the company has revised its March 2009 fiscal year outlook, expecting to lose 280 billion yen, about US$3.1 billion . Last year, Japan’s largest chipmaker posted a net profit of 127.4 billion yen. Toshiba will delay building a new chip plant in Yokkaichi until 2010 as the company doesn’t expect the chip market to bounce back until October at the earliest. It’ll also cut 4, 500 temporary jobs and cut capital spending in its chip business by 60 percent.
Freescale Semiconductor: the Austin, Texas-based chip maker reported a fourth quarter net loss of $4.03 billion, compared to a $3.48 billion loss last year. Revenue declined 39 percent to $940 million and maintains it will be exiting the cellphone chip business.
Fujitsu: the company has revised its outlook for the March 2009 fiscal year. Revised expectations include a 7 percent drop in sales to $4.7 trillion and yen and net loss of $20 billion yen. This will be Fujitsu’s first year in the red since 2002.
NEC: Japan’s NEC has announced 20, 000 job cuts which it hopes will save 80 billion yen over 2 years. The company’s net loss from October to December was 130 billion yen compared to a loss of 5.2 billion yen a year earlier. The company expects a net loss of 290 billion yen for the March 2009 fiscal year.
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