Qualcomm: next quarters present ‘uncertain business environment’

Financial news in just the past few weeks has led Qualcomm Inc. to forecast “meaningfully less” growth in CDMA-based handset markets for calendar year 2009.
The chip and IP-licensing firm cited slower consumer purchasing than previously anticipated and a purposeful contraction in channel inventory for fiscal-year guidance that missed analysts’ expectations.
Qualcomm’s stock traded down as much as 6% during the day and nearly 1% in after-hours trading, according to Yahoo Finance.
“Qualcomm joined tech’s growing crowd of downward revisionists as the slumping global economy forced the company to slash its financial targets,” wrote Scott Moritz for Fortune.
Moritz cited Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Apple Inc. as roughly analogous companies that have also dampened expectations for the coming year based on macroeconomic uncertainties.
Despite a strong fiscal fourth quarter, results in October in particular appeared to figure into the more modest guidance.
Revenue for the fiscal first quarter of 2009, now underway, is projected to be flat and in the range of $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion; in the year-ago quarter it reached $2.44 billion.
Total revenue for fiscal 2009 is projected to reach the range of $10.2 billion to $10.8 billion, down from $11.1 billion in fiscal 2008. A Thomson Reuters average of analysts’ estimates had cited the potential for $12.2 billion in sales.
The San Diego-based company forecast that CDMA- and W-CDMA-based devices would grow to about 121 million to 126 million units, up from the 95 million shipped last year. But it also projected that average selling prices of those devices would drop to $205, from $211 in the year-ago quarter, based on a shift in device sales from mature markets to emerging markets.