Investopedia: Linear Breaks Formation

It looks like the third week of January is when a little good news came back into the semiconductor world. Though Altera (Nasdaq:ALTR) and Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) previously suggested the worst was about to be over, ironically while lowering guidance for the fourth calendar quarter, equipment vendor ASML (Nasdaq:ASML) and analog chip company Linear Technology (Nasdaq:LLTC) gave outright encouraging news with their respective quarterly reports.

Results Still Not Exactly Pretty  
To be sure, enthusiasm about the Linear story is about what's going to happen and not about what did happen. Results in the company's fiscal second quarter weren't that great, as revenue dropped 11% on a sequential basis and 23% on a year-on-year comparison. The revenue shortfall was largely just a byproduct of ongoing industry de-stocking throughout industrial, communications, auto and other markets.


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