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3dfx Doesn't Announce V4 Slip

Sep 21, 1999 4:35pm CST tags: 3dfx
Seems 3dfx decided not to announce it after all. However, a friend pointed me to this post on Silicon Investor by Michael Potter that he had an email exchange with 3dfx President/CEO Greg Ballard. In it, Ballard confirms the rumors that have been going around, which is that 3dfx will indeed miss Q4 with Voodoo4.

There is no press conference scheduled, nor is there a "formal" announcement being made. We have started today to inform investors that we have determined that Napalm will not ship in the 4th quarter or if it does, too late in the quarter to have a meaningful impact on revenues. We now expect it to ship in mid February with an outside chance of mid March. We expect that when it does ship, it will be the leading performance chip in the market.

The chip is now back on a more predictable schedule with all the previous problems having been resolved. There is always risk, of course, from this point on but we feel very good about the chip at this point. We spent many more months in the back end that we thought was going to be required and, literally, time ran out for a reasonable shot at 4th quarter volumes.

We are guiding people to expect losses in Q3 and Q4 as our revenues will stay roughly the same (maybe down 10% in Q4) but with gross margins declining significantly. Q1 and Q2, however, we believe will be very strong quarters with a return to profitability.

According to this email, it would seem 3dfx missed Q4 by only a few weeks (as I think their fiscal Q4 ends in January). The stock's already been hammered recently, wonder what'll happen tomorrow.
update by steve: KombatKing was kind enough to spot the actual email, which I replaced in the news item now.

        

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