Atheros posted a revenue of $114.3 million in 4Q’07 which was up by 8% reported in the last quarter. Income for the period was $21.4 million. The networking chipsets fetched revenues of 52% while PC OEM got in 43% and the rest of 5% was brought in through consumer chipsets.
Major growth was seen in core wireless LAN segment, particularly the 11g solutions that contributed primarily to the overall growth in this quarter. Wireless LAN chipsets contribution by types was 11a/g (16%), 11g (67%) and 11n (17%) of the total wireless LAN revenues.
Hon Hai Precision Industry was the only 10% customer for the period.
By the end of the quarter, Atheros had shipped over 20 million Ethernet ports to around 20 different customers on a cumulative basis. In 2006 they had just 1 customer for this product line.
In the retail market Atheros started shipping its 11n solutions to leading six OEMs worldwide which are D-Link, NETGEAR, Linksys, Belkin, Buffalo and TP-LINK.
The carrier business revenue increased by 10% in the fourth quarter due to strong presence in regions like Europe where WLAN attach rates on broadband gateways is growing rapidly.
Atheros Communications announced ROCm single chip AR6002 family for mobile WLAN solutions. For the ROCm family of Bluetooth wireless it announced a second solution AR3031. It also announced single chip 802.11n solution for the PC market. For the carrier gateway market it announced two single chip 802.11n solutions during the period. It also announced two new designs extending Gigabit Ethernet portfolio.
During the quarter it acquired u-Nav Microelectronics which marked its entry in the GPS market. The acquisition has brought in u-Nav’s portfolio including single-chip CMOS, GPS system software for signal acquisition, tracking and GPS navigation.