Xilinx Delays Earnings Report

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 7/19/2006

Plagued by the industry's wide-spread stock options granting scandal, Xilinx will postpone its fiscal Q1 2007 earnings release, originally scheduled for July 20, due to an unfinished independent investigation into its options granting practices. 

Analysts at Lehman Brothers expects Xilinx to report June quarter revenue in line with the mid-point of its guidance of $487 million, a 3 percent increase over fiscal Q4 2006.

"We believe business trends appear broadly solid, in line with prior guidance," Tim Luke, a managing director at Lehman Brothers, said  in a research note this morning.

Lehman expects Xilinx’s communications segment to be up, growth to be flat in the wireless segment, the storage and servers segments to be up, and the industrial segment to be down, all on a sequential basis. Xilinx had guided gross margin down to 62 percent from 62.5 percent, and Lehman noted that it continues to monitor the mix shift driven by new product demand.

Looking ahead into Q3, Lehman said guidance may be slightly impacted by the recall of a number of Spartan-3 FPGAs; however, a revenue of around $496 million, at a growth range of 1 percent to 2 percent, should still be achievable.

Last month, Xilinx announced that a shareholder had filed a complaint against members of the board of directors and certain executives, alleging stock options backdating.

On June 23, Xilinx announced that it was cooperating with the SEC, which had opened an informal inquiry into its practices, procedures and disclosures regarding its stock option grants.

Xilinx has rescheduled its earnings release for July 25.