Tags:CMOS | GSM | GPRS | EDGE | WCDMA | 3G | China Mobile

Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD; the ''''Company''''), one of China''s leading wireless baseband chipset providers, today announced its first quarter 2008 financial results. Under accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America (US GAAP), diluted earnings per ADS was US$0.06 in the first quarter of 2008 (1Q08), an increase of 20% from US$0.05 in the same period in 2007 (1Q07). Net income for 1Q08 was US$2.8 million, an increase of 37% from US$2.0 million in 1Q07.

US GAAP net income for 1Q08 included US$1.9 million of share-based compensation expense and US$0.4 million of amortization of intangibles from the Quorum acquisition. Excluding the impact of this share-based compensation expense and the amortization of intangibles from the Quorum acquisition, the Company''s non-GAAP net income for 1Q08 would have been US$5.0 million, up 55% from US$3.2 million in 1Q07. Diluted non-GAAP earnings per ADS in 1Q08 was US$0.11, up from US$0.08 in 1Q07.

Commenting on the results, the Company''s President and CEO, Dr. Ping Wu, said:

''''We are pleased that we were able to achieve our financial guidance in light of several factors that made this a challenging first quarter. Traditionally, Q1 is a seasonally slower quarter for the cellphone market. This year the market also had to work down a surplus of inventory from Q4 and cope with the impact of a snowstorm that disrupted travel and consumer spending. We were able to use this slower environment to streamline our internal operations, improve our product mix and enhance our product cost structure, which we believe will have a positive impact on profits in the 2nd half of this year.

On the business side, we completed our purchase of Quorum Systems in January and are far along in the integration of its R&D team and products into the combined Company. The joint team has already had some early successes in getting Quorum''s RF transceivers designed into our customers'' products and given this traction we are targeting a 30-40% attach rate for our basebands with Quorum''s transceivers by the end of the year. Quorum''s current products include low cost, low power single chip CMOS based multi-band transceivers for the GSM, GPRS, EDGE, TD-SCDMA, and WCDMA markets. With this acquisition we have more design options and more complete solutions for our customers--from 2G to 3G, physical layer software to protocol and applications.

On the 3G front, we are pleased that China Mobile began commercial trial in April and that two of our customers received a majority of the initial handset orders. We believe China Mobile will place two more rounds of handset orders in Q2 and Q3 respectively and that it has already begun to implement the 2nd phase of its TD-SCDMA network. We remain confident that we are well positioned for the ramp of this new technology in 2008 and beyond, as the market looks to ramp towards 100 million TD-based phones by 2011.



Source:PR Newswire