Altera Corporation has announced 2006 sales of $1.29 billion, up 14%, compared with $1.12 billion in 2005. New product sales increased 150 percent. Net income for 2006 was $323.2 million, $0.88 per diluted share, versus net income of $278.8 million, $0.74 per diluted share, in 2005. Non-GAAP net income in 2006, excluding the effects of stock-based compensation expense, was $371.2 million, $1.01
per diluted share.
Fourth quarter sales were $317.4 million, up 13 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005 and down 7 percent from the third quarter of 2006. Fourth quarter net income was $99.9 million, $0.27 per diluted share, up 43 percent compared with net income of $69.7 million, $0.19 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2005. Gross profit margin was 66.3 percent for the fourth quarter of 2006 versus 66.7 percent for the fourth quarter of 2005.
During the fourth quarter, Altera reduced its 2006 effective tax rate from 15 percent to 10 percent resulting in a net income benefit of $18 million or $0.05 per diluted share. The tax benefit in the fourth quarter arose primarily from the reinstatement in December 2006 of the federal R&D tax credit and the favorable impact of a tax audit settlement.
Altera repurchased 7.1 million shares of its common stock during 2006 at a cost of $140.4 million, with 4.4 million shares repurchased during the fourth quarter at a cost of $87.4 million. Altera ended the quarter with $1.6 billion in cash and investments.
"Our 2006 results show an acceleration in top line growth for Altera as we once again outpaced semiconductor industry growth. We aim to capitalize on this momentum and drive for additional sales growth and market share gains. Our overall financial performance remained very strong with profitability that puts us at the top of the programmable logic industry," said John Daane, president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board. "We are in the final development stage for our high-end Stratix(R) III FPGA devices and are completing work on several new products that we will introduce in 2007, making 2007 a very ambitious year for us. We are confident that we can extend our record of smooth new product roll-outs, and that we will be well positioned to compete for the substantial growth opportunity available to the programmable logic industry."
Altera's Stratix III FPGA family has been selected as one of EDN magazine's Hot 100 Products of 2006. This annual list is compiled by the magazine's editors and represents the year's most important products that advanced the state of the art in electronics. The 65-nm Stratix III family, together with our Quartus(R) II development software, uses ground-breaking advancements to deliver devices with 50 percent lower power, 25 percent higher performance, and twice the density of Stratix II devices. The unique Programmable Power Technology found in Stratix III FPGAs responds to customers who increasingly need new ways to reduce power use in their designs. Stratix III devices allow the user's design to automatically establish the optimum balance between performance and power throughout the device, dramatically reducing overall power consumption, making Stratix III FPGAs the lowest-power, high-performance FPGAs available. Customers have already begun designing with this new family which will begin shipping in the third quarter.
The range of products that employ Altera's HardCopy(R) structured ASICs continues to expand across all market segments served by Altera. As part of this trend, SANYO Electric Company, Ltd. is using Altera's HardCopy devices in its PLV-Z5 series of home projectors. In this application SANYO is taking advantage of Altera's Nios(R) II embedded processor for image processing and enhancement. Together, the HardCopy device and Nios processor deliver a combination of digital signal processing performance and programming flexibility that efficiently integrates many video functions into a single device. The previous version of this award-winning projector used Altera's Stratix FPGAs. The PLV-Z5 has won several awards including this year's HiVi magazine's Best Buy Award, a Hot Product award from ProjectorReviews.com and five-star ratings across all review categories from Projector Central.
Altera's Stratix II GX FPGA family has won EDN China's 2006 Innovation Award in the digital IC and digital logic category. The award results from a pre-selection process by a panel of EDN China technical editors and online voting among the 35,000 EDN China readers. This recognition confirms the widespread appeal of this third generation of Altera FPGAs with embedded transceivers. Stratix II GX FPGAs are the industry's only FPGAs to provide transceiver speeds up to 6.375 Gbps on every channel, operating
with the industry's lowest power consumption and best signal integrity. Altera has now completed the rollout of the entire product family and has begun shipping production-qualified parts to customers. |
