(PRNewswire) —  Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced second quarter sales of $414.2 million, down 5 percent from the first quarter of 2015 and down 16 percent from the second quarter of 2014. Second quarter net income was $70.3 million, $0.23 per diluted share, compared with net income of $94.9 million, $0.31 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2015 and $127.0 million, $0.41 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2014.

Year-to-date cash flow from operating activities was $225.9 million. Altera's board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.18 per share, to be paid on September 1, 2015 to shareholders of record on August 10, 2015.

"Our wireless customers reduced demand on us this quarter, as expected, in reaction to continuing adverse market conditions. This pause in wireless spend more than offset growth across many of our vertical markets," said John Daane, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. "The most important news for the second quarter was the June 1st announcement of an agreement for Intel to acquire Altera. Over the past several years we have worked closely with Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company and a proven technology leader. Through that interaction, we understand well the benefits this transaction will bring to our customers through development of innovative market-leading FPGAs and SoCs that will be enabled by Intel and Altera joining forces."

Second Quarter Business Summary

As previously forecasted, Altera's sales declined sequentially with Telecom and Wireless sales down sharply, attributable in large measure to the company's wireless business. With a few exceptions, there was broad growth across the remainder of the company. Gross margin was 69.4%, significantly improved from first quarter levels, as a result of favorable vertical market mix. Operating expense increased sequentially, largely the result of $18.5 million in merger-related expenses. The company's tax rate was 17.7%, higher than anticipated, largely due to adverse geographic mix of earnings. Altera did not repurchase any of its shares during the quarter.

In light of the company's pending acquisition by Intel, Altera will no longer provide forward-looking guidance.

Recent accomplishments mark Altera's continuing progress:

• Altera has revealed architectural and product details of its Stratix^® 10 FPGAs and SoCs, the next generation of high-end programmable logic devices, delivering breakthrough levels of performance, integration, density and security.
  • Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs leverage Altera's revolutionary HyperFlex™ FPGA fabric architecture, the FPGA industry's most significant fabric architecture innovation in over a decade. The HyperFlex fabric and Altera's use of Intel's^® 14 nm Tri-Gate process, with its full process node advantage, provides 2X higher core performance over Altera's previous high-end family.
  • All members of the Stratix 10 FPGA and SoC family leverage heterogeneous 3D SiP (System in Package) integration to efficiently and economically integrate a high-density monolithic FPGA core fabric (up to 5.5M logic elements) with other advanced components, thereby increasing the scalability and flexibility of Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs. Altera's heterogeneous SiP integration is enabled through the use of Intel's proprietary EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) technology, which provides higher performance, reduced complexity, lower cost and enhanced signal integrity compared with interposer-based approaches.
  • All densities in the Stratix 10 family will also be available with an integrated 64-bit ARM^® quad-core Cortex^TM-A53 hard processor system. With these Stratix10 SoCs, Altera will extend its industry leadership position as the only vendor to offer high-end SoC FPGAs.

• Altera has announced its Spectra-Q™ engine, a new technology at the heart of the company's proven Quartus^® II software, to improve design productivity and time-to-market for next-generation programmable devices. As FPGAs and SoCs deliver dramatically increased capabilities with multi-million logic element devices, the Spectra-Q engine is a combination of software technologies that dramatically accelerate the design process by reducing design iterations, while continuing to deliver the industry's fastest compile times. The Spectra-Q engine features faster algorithms and allows for incremental design changes without needing to perform a full design compile. Built on top of the Spectra-Q engine is an industry-first platform design tool called BluePrint that allows designers to assign interfaces with greater efficiency. This tool reduces design iterations by 10X compared to the number of design iterations without the use of this tool by allowing designers to explore and create legal IO placements up-front with real-time fitter-checking. The Spectra-Q engine is available today to early access customers.
• Altera has joined the Industrial Internet Consortium, a collaborative industry organization facilitating development of a global ecosystem for the Internet of Things (IoT). Founded by AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel in March 2014, the Industrial Internet Consortium catalyzes and coordinates the priorities and enabling technologies of the Industrial Internet. Altera FPGA, SoC and power products already play a significant role in enabling connectivity in RF wireless systems and machine-to-machine communication networks. Programmable logic is applied extensively in factory automation and smart grid applications, supporting high-performance control and analytics that enhance the efficiency, safety and security in advanced manufacturing and power systems. FPGAs are also being deployed in next-generation automotive and medical IoT systems, and in smart city applications, such as intelligent lighting and traffic management systems that incorporate high-performance embedded vision and video analytics capabilities.

 

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