South Portland, Maine–Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. has announced fourth quarter (Q4) 2000 sales in the range of $468 million to $470 million. Trade revenues were up 36% from Q4 1999 and up slightly from third quarter (Q3) 2000, while foundry revenues from manufacturing service agreements with other semiconductor vendors dropped sequentially.

“We were encouraged that we were able to continue our strong year over year revenue growth, and also grow our trade revenues sequentially from Q3, a result we believe outpaced many of our competitors,” said Kirk Pond, chairman, president, and CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor. “As we stated in our mid-quarter update, we took advantage of our multi-market business model with its diverse customer base, shifting our product mix to capitalize on immediate opportunities in December. While we didn’t achieve our goal of 3% quarterly sequential growth in total revenue, we did offset many of the backlog adjustments and cancellations that continued through the latter half of Q4.

“As we stated previously, we expect the first quarter (Q1) of 2001 will be seasonally soft, as is normal for our industry. We now believe our Q1 2001 sales will be about 5% to 8% below Q4 levels. We continue to believe we are in a reasonably short-term inventory correction and expect our revenues to rebound slowly in the second quarter with revenue growth accelerating in the second half of 2001 and into 2002. We believe that this outlook is in line with more recent industry forecasts for 2001,” continued Pond.

“We know our multi-market business model is working and we believe we are well-positioned to remain solidly profitable through this period of slower industry growth,” stated Joe Martin, executive vice president and chief financial officer. “Roughly one-third of our sales are from new products, which have helped improve our gross margins during the last several quarters. And while we expect some margin erosion during this correction, we believe sales of our higher margin new products will help offset expected lower prices in our mature product sales over the next few quarters. Additionally, we continue to adjust our spending plans to align with projected growth rates. We’ll give more details on our forward guidance and earnings results when we release Q4 and full year results on January 23, 2001.”