NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Texas Instruments, the world's largest maker of chips used in cell phones, raised the low end of its first quarter sales and earnings guidance Monday, a sign that demand for handsets and other consumer electronics devices appears to remain strong.
But analysts questioned whether the good news would be enough to put a stop to the two-day pullback in tech stocks and chip stocks in particular.
The Dallas-based company said it now expects sales of $2.84 billion to $2.95 billion for the first quarter. Analysts' consensus estimate was $2.85 billion, a 30 percent increase from a year earlier. TI told Wall Street in January that it was anticipating revenues of $2.72 billion to $2.95 billion.
On the earnings front, TI forecast a profit of 19 cents to 22 cents a share for the quarter. Wall Street is expecting earnings of 19 cents a share, compared to earnings of 7 cents a share in the first quarter of 2003. TI's original guidance was a range of 16 cents and 22 cents a share.
Despite the news, shares of TI (TXN: Research, Estimates) slipped in after-hours trading according to Island ECN, following a 2.7 percent decline in regular trading on the New York Stock Exchange Monday. Still, the stock has held up better than many of its chip rivals so far this year -- up 4 percent while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has slipped about 4.5 percent.
The company said that semiconductor sales should be in a range of $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion, up from its prior forecast of $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion. TI gets the rest of its sales from sensors, controls and calculators.
TI appears to be continuing to benefit from a strong appetite for cell phones and other consumer electronics devices that use the company's chips, such as digital cameras and high-definition digital televisions. The new midpoint of TI's first quarter sales guidance is more than 4 percent higher than the company's fourth quarter sales of $2.77 billion.
Most chip companies tend to report slight sequential sales declines in the first quarter. Demand for tech gadgets that contain chips usually wanes a bit following the holiday shopping season and so-called corporate "budget flushes," last-ditch spending by big businesses at year's end.
| Related stories
|
|
|
|
|
During a conference call with analysts, Ron Slaymaker, TI's vice president and manager of investor relations, said that the company was seeing growth across all product lines. He added that visibility for the second quarter was improving.
Leading chip manufacturer Intel (INTC: Research, Estimates), which is tied more closely to the maturing personal computer market, gave a lukewarm first quarter update Thursday. Intel narrowed its sales outlook and the new midpoint of its guidance was below Wall Street's consensus estimates. That news helped spark a chip stock sell-off Friday, and the selling continued Monday.
One analyst said even though TI's numbers were strong, they might not be enough to reverse the chip and tech selling of the past few days. "It's a tough market right now," said Ren Zamora, an analyst with Loop Capital Markets. "Even if you do good things, investors are skittish."
Quinn Bolton, an analyst with Oppenheimer, agreed. "This was a good business update. Numbers are going in the right direction," said Bolton. "But this probably won't be enough to get the stock moving significantly higher."
Analysts quoted in this piece do not own shares of Texas Instruments and their firms have no investment banking relationships with the company.
|
