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Cypress Reports First-Quarter 2014 Results
[April 22, 2014]

Cypress Reports First-Quarter 2014 Results


(ENP Newswire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) ENP Newswire - 22 April 2014 Release date- 17042014 - SAN JOSE, Calif. - Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: CY) today announced its first-quarter 2014 results, which included the remarks below from its president and CEO, T.J. Rodgers.



Highlights for the quarter included: First-quarter revenue and earnings are at the high end of guidance Non-GAAP operating income increased 116% year-on-year Inventory decreased 11% sequentially Free cash flow increased 60% sequentially Book-to-bill was 1.08 Cypress's first-quarter revenue increased 1.5% sequentially, outpacing normal seasonality and exceeding the upper range of our initial guidance with broad revenue increases. Our continued focus on operating expense management showed up in a comparison of the first quarter of 2013 ($173 million in revenue, $0.03 EPS) to the first quarter of 2014 ($170 million in revenue, $0.07 EPS).

We exited the first quarter with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.08 and expect solid sequential revenue growth in the second quarter. Our Q2 earnings will grow much faster than revenue, reflecting the inherent leverage created by our efficiency improvements.


The design win pipeline for our TrueTouch touchscreen products was evident at both the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain last quarter; we saw multiple new products with Cypress touchscreen solutions, such as the YotaPhone 2 and the ZTE nubia Z5S, cited in this release, and the Huawei MediaPad X1. The Yota Devices and Huawei products use our latest Gen5 touchscreen product, the TMA568, which has begun to generate revenue just six months after we brought it to market.

BUSINESS REVIEW Our non-GAAP consolidated gross margin for the first quarter was 50.3%, down 0.7 percentage points from the previous quarter, primarily due to product mix. Excluding our Emerging Technologies Division (ETD), our core semiconductor gross margin was 51.8%. ETD revenue is growing rapidly and will contribute significantly to revenue growth in 2014.

Net inventory at the end of the first quarter was $89.2 million, down 11% from the fourth quarter.

FIRST-QUARTER 2014 HIGHLIGHTS Cypress broadly introduced a new family of CapSense controllers that enables engineers of all levels to quickly implement sleek and robust capacitive buttons, sliders and proximity sensors without the need for coding or firmware development. The new CY8CMBR3x controllers provide industry-leading features, such as liquid tolerance, a high signal-to-noise ratio and proximity sensing, making them ideal replacements for mechanical buttons in industrial, medical, consumer and wearable electronics applications at a cost of $0.03 per button.

Cypress introduced a TrueTouch Gen4X capacitive touchscreen controller family that supports touchscreens with advanced features and larger screen sizes up to 8.3 inches. The Gen4X TMA448 controller delivers best-in-class gloved-finger tracking and noise immunity, enabling high-performance touchscreens for superphones, smartphones, tablets and e-readers in cost-sensitive markets such as China.

In a teardown of the Qualcomm Toq smartwatch, the electronics industry analysis firm TechInsights reported that a Cypress TrueTouch TMA140 controller drives the device's fast and accurate touchscreen navigation. This wearables design win follows Cypress's win in the Sony Smartwatch 2. Cypress touch controllers now can operate on just milliwatts of power, a necessity in the world of wearables.

ZTE selected Cypress's TrueTouch Gen4 touchscreen controller for its new, top-of-the-line nubia Z5S and nubia Z5S Mini smartphones. Gen4 enables the family's 'easy-wake' functionality, which allows users to activate the phones from sleep mode with a convenient, customized gesture, such as tracing the letter 'X.' Yota Devices selected Cypress's TrueTouch Gen5 touchscreen controllers to drive both of the displays in its next-generation YotaPhone. This premium Android phone uses the TMA568 controller for advanced multi-touch functionality in the standard display on the front of the phone and the TMA545 chip to control the 'always-on' electronic paper display on the back of the phone.

Cypress continues to work with multiple touch-sensor suppliers to enable more accurate and responsive user interfaces for smartphones, tablets, wearables and other touchscreen applications. In Q1, Cypress announced that its TrueTouch touchscreen controllers can now drive the silver nanowire sensors from Carestream Advanced Materials and the SANTE silver nanoparticle touch sensors from Cima NanoTech.

Cypress announced that it is offering its powerful, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0-based PSoC 4 programmable system-on-chip for just $1 and a new PSoC 4 prototyping board for only $4. The silicon and kit enable design engineers to upgrade their 8- and 16-bit designs to 32 bits for less than the cost of a pack of AA batteries.

Cypress introduced a USB 3.0 hub controller for the 5-Gbps SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard. The EZ-USB HX3 controller, which has been certified by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), has been tested with hundreds of USB legacy devices to guarantee robust interoperability.

HX3 has a unique feature called Shared Link, which spits four of the hub's USB 3.0 ports into four SuperSpeed ports and four standard USB 2.0 ports, enabling eight ports in total. It also provides charging support for all important standards and full configurability, addressing applications such as docking stations, monitors, Ultrabook computers, digital TVs, set-top boxes, printers and servers.

Cypress announced production availability of the industry's first fourth-generation Quad Data Rate SRAM. Cypress's QDR-IV SRAM, the market's highest-performance standard networking memory solution, offers a Random Transaction Rate (RTR) up to 2,132 million transactions per second (MT/s), which meets the demanding bandwidth requirements of 100-Gb to 400-Gb line cards in next-generation switches and routers. Cypress offers QDR-IV SRAMs in 72Mb and 144Mb densities.

Cypress subsidiary Deca Technologies, a provider of electronic interconnect solutions for the semiconductor industry, shipped its 100-millionth component. The company attributes its rapid growth to strong and sustained demand for wafer-level chip scale packages (WLCSP)-which are three to six times smaller than conventional chip packages. Deca manufactures WLCSPs using its unique, integrated Autoline production platform, which automates chip packaging to achieve faster time-to-market at a lower cost.

An employee relations services and software company, Achievers, named Cypress to its annual list of the 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in the U.S. The award recognizes companies that display leadership and innovation in engaging their employees.

Cypress announced that its Board of Directors approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.11 per share, payable to holders of record of the company's common stock as of the close of business on March 27, 2014. This dividend was paid on April 17, 2014.

ABOUT CYPRESS Cypress delivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions that provide customers with rapid time-to-market and exceptional system value. Cypress offerings include the flagship PSoC 1, PSoC 3, PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP programmable system-on-chip families. Cypress is the world leader in capacitive user interface solutions including CapSense touch sensing, TrueTouch touchscreens, and trackpad solutions for notebook PCs and peripherals.

Cypress is a world leader in USB controllers, which enhance connectivity and performance in a wide range of consumer and industrial products. Cypress is also the world leader in SRAM and nonvolatile RAM memories. Cypress serves numerous major markets, including consumer, mobile handsets, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial and military. Cypress trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol CY. Visit Cypress online at www.cypress.com.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Statements herein that are not historical facts and that refer to Cypress or its subsidiaries' plans and expectations for Q2 2014 and the remainder of fiscal year 2014 and beyond are forward-looking statements made pursuant to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

We may use words such as 'believe,' 'expect,' 'future,' 'plan,' 'intend' and similar expressions to identify such forward-looking statements that include, but are not limited to, statements related to the semiconductor market; the strength and growth of our proprietary and programmable products; our expectations regarding our revenue growth and earnings leverage; our expectation that our ETD division will significantly contribute to our 2014 revenue growth; our expectations regarding the demand for our products and how our products are expected to perform, as well as American Semiconductor's transfer of a specialized wafer process to our manufacturing facility.

Such statements reflect our current expectations, which are based on information and data available to our management as of the date of this release.

Our actual results may differ materially due to a variety of uncertainties and risk factors, including, but not limited to, the state of and future of the global economy, business conditions and growth trends in the semiconductor market, whether our products perform as expected, whether the demand for our proprietary and programmable products is fully realized, our ability to manage our business to have strong earnings and significant revenue growth, reduce operating expenses, our ability to effectively implement third party wafer processes, the strength or softness of the markets we serve, our ability to maintain and improve our gross margins and realize our bookings, the seasonality of the markets we serve, the financial performance of our subsidiaries and Emerging Technology Division, and other risks described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

We assume no responsibility to update any such forward-looking statements.

Cypress, the Cypress logo, PSoC, TrueTouch, EZ-USB and CapSense are registered trademarks and Shared Link is a trademark of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contact: Cypress Semiconductor Corp.

198 Champion Ct. Building 6.3 San Jose, CA 95134 Tel: 1 408-232-4552 Email: [email protected] (c) 2014 Electronic News Publishing -

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