Sometimes you have to pick your battles – even if your ambitions are Texas-sized.
That's what's going on with Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) today. The analog chip division and the mobile processor segment are doing just fine, but there's no rocket fuel left in the wireless infrastructure market – so the company is cutting down on its efforts in the underperforming market.
Third-quarter earnings dipped 17% year over year to $0.43 per share. Sales came in 8% lower at $3.4 billion, due mostly to the redheaded wireless stepchild, whose revenue dropped by 16%. So TI is looking to cut costs right there, trying to save as much as $200 million a year starting next summer. It appears that some low-end product lines are now for sale in order to unlock some more value from those aging investments.
TI said that it is in discussions with undisclosed potential buyers, but left us guessing their names. QUALCOMM (NASDAQ:QCOM) might make sense on first blush, because that's TI's biggest rival in that particular market. But the Q doesn't seem to need what TI is selling, and is focusing on the high-end market anyhow. Maybe Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) wants to broaden its horizons? Analog Devices (NYSE:ADI) sold its own baseband operations to Taiwanese MediaTek back in January – perhaps the Asians are hungry for more?
That gear shift came with a side of cautious guidance. The company expects "revenue to decline substantially based on weak order trends over the past few months," reducing inventory levels, cutting back on chip manufacturing, and tightening the belt on capital expenses. It's a very different tune from the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reports we got from the dueling CPU dragons – Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD) – last week, which firmly partitions the computing chip market from the commodity chip segments where TI likes to roam. Good news in one chip market doesn't necessarily transfer to the other.
As gloomy as that outlook sounds, don't forget that TI pulled in $1.05 billion of operating cash flow. The stock has been severely punished, trailing the S&P 500 substantially over the past 12 months. How often do you get to buy an acknowledged technology leader for less than 10 times trailing earnings? Is it time to think about Texas?
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