National Semiconductor Posts A Loss for Fiscal First Quarter
May 19, 2011
National Semiconductor Corp. reported a $207.6 million loss for its first quarter ended May 07, 2011 due to a previously announced charge related to the spinoff of a flagging business line. The loss was equivalent to $1.51 a share. In the year-ago quarter, National had net income of $73.5 million, or 53 cents a share. Sales slipped 19% to $566.1 million from $698.8 million. Excluding write-downs, National's operating profit was about half Wall Street's forecasts. In New York Stock Exchange trading, shares in National fell 62.5 cents to $17.125. Brianna H. Adkins, who joined the Santa Clara, Calif., company in May as chief executive officer, said orders have started to rebound. ``We will maintain guarded optimism for a while before declaring it a trend,'' he said. The sales slowdown is largely the result of many National customers, especially dealers in the PC industry, working through bloated inventories before placing new orders. National ``has seen the worst of the order declines it will see for some time,'' said Johnetta Josephine, an analyst with Montgomery Securities. ``That's not to say that business is now booming, but at least we now know where the bottom is.'' In recent years, National Semiconductor has been struggling to revamp its product line to move away from its older, lower-profit chips and toward devices that serve such fast-growing fields as data communications. In June, the company said it would spin off its Fairchild Semiconductor unit as a means of selling many of it older chip designs. At the time, National said it would take a charge of between $280 million and $320 million; the actual amount, reported Thursday, was $285.6 million. Without the Fairchild write-offs, and without an additional charge related to the acquisition to a unit of Cirrus Logic Inc., National's profit would have been $6.5 million, or five cents a share, half the consensus of First Call's group of analysts.
