Lattice Appoints Brian Beattie To Board & Audit Committee

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:LSCC) recently announced changes in its management and appointed Brian Beattie to its board of directors and Audit Committee.

Beattie is currently the Executive Vice President, Business Operations, and Chief Administrative Officer of Synopys, Inc. (SNPS). Prior to this, he served Synopys as the Chief Financial Officer from 2006–2014.

Alongside, he has been a Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration at SupportSoft for six years. Beattie began his career at Nortel Networks and worked there for over 19 years. There he undertook important responsibilities on corporate, financial and operational matters.

Brian holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and MBA in International Finance and Management from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Management believes that Brian’s considerable experience in finance and business proficiency will be instrumental in helping the company achieve its long-term goals.

John Bourgoin, Lattice’s Chairman of the Board, said, “We are very pleased to have Brian join our Board of Directors given his proven track record. He brings substantial additional financial and operations expertise to our Board, which will be helpful as the Company continues to execute on its business strategy and lays the groundwork for its longer-term growth.”

Lattice announced mixed first-quarter 2016 results wherein adjusted loss per share of 5 cents was in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate. However, revenues of $96.5 million were down both on a sequential and a year-over-year basis.

Mixed Second Quarter Likely for Lattice

Estimates have been going down ahead of the company’s second-quarter earnings release. The company has a mixed record of earnings surprises in recent quarters.

Lattice issued a decent second-quarter fiscal guidance, with revenues in the range of $97 million to $103 million. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at $100.0 million.

Additionally, management expects gross margins of 57% (+/-2% sequentially) and total operating expenses of approximately $47.5 million (+/-3% sequentially).

The company is slated to report second-quarter results on Aug 4, 2016.

Lattice Sees FPGA Growth Amid Competition

Lattice Semiconductor designs, develops and markets high performance programmable logic devices and related development system software.

The company has been making efforts to launch several products. Also, demand for field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is increasing because these offer flexibility in terms of designs at lower R&D costs to electronic device manufacturing companies. Therefore, the company’s innovations in the FPGA space, solid execution and design wins are expected to drive demand, going forward.

However, increasing competition from Altera and Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX), a challenging technology spending environment and weakness in the consumer market keep us on the sidelines.

Currently, Maxim has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some well-ranked stocks in the technology space are CEVA Inc. (NASDAQ:CEVA) , FormFactor Inc. (NASDAQ:FORM) and Himax Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:HIMX) , each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).