Europe's largest chip company STMicroelectronics NV made a net loss of $36 million on revenues for the fourth quarter of 2013 that land in the middle of previous guidance at $2.015 billion.
ST (Geneva, Switzerland) has made losses for several quarters as it has tried to move away from its mobile chip joint venture with Ericsson to focus on sensors, analog and embedded processing.
Sales were flat sequentially and down 6.8 percent from $2.162 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012. However, the loss had narrowed considerably from $142 million in the previous quarter, and from $428 million in the same quarter a year before. The lowered losses were put down to reduced operating expenses, and redueced impairment charges related to the discontinued ST-Ericsson mobile chip business.
Nonetheless CEO Carlo Bozotti said that he expects overall revenues to decrease in the first quarter of 2014 by 9.5 percent plus or minus 3.5 percent. "First quarter revenues reflect – on top of seasonality including the New Year holiday in Asia – a drop in revenues from ST-Ericsson legacy products of more than half from the fourth quarter of 2013 level," he said in a statement.
For the full year ST made a net loss of $465 million on sales revenue of $8.082 billion, compared with a loss of $2.081 billion on sales of $8.493 billion in 2012.
"In 2013, we grew 3.2 percent excluding the former ST-Ericsson products, a better performance than our served market, with the main contributions coming from our microcontrollers and automotive products. We also made good progress on our customer diversification and mass market and distribution initiatives. In addition, our leading-edge set-top box products and FDSOI-based ASICs led to important design wins and traction with major worldwide operators and OEM customers," Bozotti, added.
Bozotti also said that while the semiconductor market overall did not perform as expected in 2013 he was encouraged by positive macro-economic signs and by the market dynamics expected in 2014.
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