Altera Earnings Preview

Watch Altera's (Nasdaq: ALTR) earnings report to see if it can beat analyst expectations for the fifth consecutive quarter. The company will unveil its latest earnings Thursday. Altera designs and manufactures programmable logic devices, HardCopy ASIC devices, pre-defined design building blocks, cores, and associated development tools.

What analysts say:

• Buy, sell, or hold?: The majority of analysts back Altera as a buy. But with 60.9% of analysts rating it a buy, Altera is still below the mean analyst rating of its nearest 10 competitors, which average 64.3% buys. Analysts like Altera better than competitor Xilinx overall. Nine out of 21 analysts rate Xilinx a buy compared with 14 of 23 for Altera. Analysts still rate the stock a moderate buy, but they are a bit more wary about it compared with three months ago.
• Revenue Forecasts: On average, analysts predict $542.2 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 2.8% from the year-ago quarter.
• Wall Street Earnings Expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.59 per share. Estimates range from $0.58 to $0.64.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are solidly backing the stock with 96.4% assigning it an "outperform" rating. The community at large backs the All-Stars with 92.8% giving it a rating of "outperform." Fools are keen on Altera and haven't been shy with their opinions lately, logging 119 posts in the past 30 days. Even with a robust four out of five stars, Altera's CAPS rating falls a little short of the community's upbeat outlook.

Management:
Altera's profit has risen year over year by an average of more than twofold over the past five quarters.

Now let's look at how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins represent the efficiency with which companies capture portions of sales dollars. The following table shows gross, operating, and net margins over the past four quarters.

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