PLX Technology: Fiscal 4Q09 Financial Results

PLX Technology, Inc. announced record fourth-quarter revenues of $26.6 million and net income of $2.6 million, or $0.07 per share (diluted).

For 2009, the Company reported revenue of $82.8 million and a net loss of $18.8 million or $0.53 per share (diluted).

“Our 24 percent quarterly revenue growth exceeds the industry growth rate and is due to the design-in success that we have had in both the storage and PCI Express switching product categories,” said Ralph Schmitt, president and CEO of PLX. “PLX’s culture is to win and to do it in a profitable manner. The PLX team is dedicated to reducing costs and driving growth. I am proud of their accomplishments in both of these areas in 2009. It was a difficult year but ended very positively for the company, which we believe provides a good launching point for 2010.”

“Enterprise customers drove the growth in the quarter, much of which was driven by the build-out of data centers to support cloud-based applications,” Schmitt said. “Sales of our PCI Express products reached record levels through proliferation into networking, storage, computing and embedded applications. Sales of PLX’s consumer storage products were down due to seasonality, while we saw a rebound of our distribution-based business in connectivity devices for the communications and industrial markets.”

Product Information
PLX continues to innovate and deliver industry leading products with key customer engagements. The following products and developments were publicly announced during the quarter:

• Introduction of the OXUFS946DSE, a quad-interface-to-dual-SATA consumer direct attached storage (DAS) controller that features the industry’s highest performance and lowest power, with integrated hardware RAID and encryption engines.
• Launch of the PEX 8625 and PEX 8636, the industry’s highest port-count (24-ports) enterprise PCI Express Gen 2 switches for the communications market. Key benefits of the new switches include multicast and multi-host features.
• Completion of the first design of PLX silicon using 40nm geometry, a milestone that supports the development of a variety of new solutions over the next few years, including PCI Express Gen 3 switches and highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices.
• Announcement of a new design with Fujitsu in which two PLX PEX 8533 PCI Express switches are providing reliable, power-saving performance in Fujitsu’s new enterprise M3000 servers.
• Announcement that AMD is using PLX high-performance PEX 8647 PCI Express switches to enable its new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics cards.

Business Outlook
The following statements are based on current expectations.

• Net revenues for the first quarter ended March 31, 2010, are expected to be between $27.0 million and $29.0 million.
• Gross margins are expected to be approximately 56 percent.
• Operating expenses are expected to be approximately $15.0 million. Included in operating expenses are share-based compensation and acquisition-related amortization charges of approximately $900,000.