Earnings Preview For Altera Corporation (ALTR)

Altera Corporation ALTR is expected to publish its Q1 results for this year after the markets close on Tuesday, April 26. Analysts are expecting earnings per share to reach $0.65, after posting $0.50 a year ago. Since January, analysts have increased their earnings per share estimate by $0.03. Altera Corporation is a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor company. Altera designs, manufactures and markets programmable logic devices (PLDs), HardCopy application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), intellectual property (IP) cores and development software. The Company's PLDs consist of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), which are semiconductor integrated circuits, or chips, that its customers program to perform logic functions in their electronic systems. It currently employs around 2,600 people. Altera's shares are currently trading near their 10-year high of $46.08. Their closing value last week was $45.99. Among a number of positive news for Altera was a recent showcase of its next generation 4K broadcast solutions for video processing at the 2011 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas. It might be hard for Altera's shares to keep up their current momentum, however, because analysts are predicting slightly weaker earnings results next quarter. Their projections put the revenues in Q2 at $533 million, down from $536.33 million predicted for this quarter.