Altera's Q3 results -- up 3 percent from Q2

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced third quarter sales of $286.6 million, up 3 percent from the second quarter of 2009 and down 20 percent from the third quarter of 2008. New products grew 7 percent sequentially.

Third quarter net income was $56.7 million, $0.19 per diluted share, up from net income of $47.4 million, $0.16 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2009 and down from $94.7 million, $0.31 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2008. Third quarter 2009 results include a $4.8 million pre-tax charge relating to a previously announced restructuring.

Year-to-date cash flow from operating activities was $196.4 million. Altera ended the quarter with $1.4 billion in cash and short-term investments.

Altera’s board of directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.05 per share payable on December 1, 2009 to stockholders of record on November 10, 2009.

"Compared to our initial expectations, business conditions improved steadily during the quarter," said John Daane, president, CEO, and chairman of the board. "Sales of 40-nm devices tripled sequentially. Our first-to-market position and technology advantages at 40-nm continue to drive record design-win results."

Several recent accomplishments mark the company’s continuing progress.

* Altera's Stratix IV GX FPGAs have now moved to volume production — the first 40-nm FPGAs in the industry to reach this milestone. The Stratix IV device was the industry's first 40-nm FPGA available when it began shipping at the end of 2008.

* The Stratix IV family offers the highest density and highest performance FPGAs available today and is used in a variety of customers' high-speed backplane and cabling interfaces, chip-to-chip interconnects and protocol-bridging applications. Altera remains on schedule to ship its entire Stratix IV FPGA family in volume production by April 2010.

* Altera has increased the high-end density range of its 40-nm Stratix IV E FPGAs to an industry-leading 820,000 logic elements. The Stratix IV EP4SE820 FPGA is the industry's highest density, highest performance and lowest power FPGA in its class. Stratix IV users also benefit from the productivity advantages of Altera's Quartus II design software that are particularly valuable in high-density designs.

* Features such as advanced place-and-route algorithms, multiprocessor support and incremental compile reduce customers' compile times by a factor of two or three on average when compared to the nearest competitor's 40-nm high-density FPGAs. The EP4SE820 FPGA is ideally suited for a variety of high-end digital applications that require resource-rich FPGAs, including ASIC prototyping and emulation, wireline, wireless, military, and computer and storage applications.

* Altera recently received the "2009 FPGA Best Market Performance Award in the China Telecommunication Market" from China Electronics News (CEN). With a circulation of 200,000 in China, CEN operates under the supervision of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In making the award, CEN noted that Altera's industry-first 40-nm devices provided a good balance of integrated features, outstanding performance and unique Programmable Power Technology, which helped telecommunication suppliers meet their performance, power and cost targets.

Business outlook for Q4 2009
Sequential Sales Growth: Up 6% to 10%
Gross Margin: 67% to 68%
Research and Development: $65 to $67 million
SG&A: $57 to $59 million
Other Income/Expense: Approximately $0.5 million expense
Tax Rate: 13.5% to 14.5%