Sequans' fourth-quarter loss spirals to $9.9M

Sequans Communications expects its LTE business to pick up during the second half of 2013, but the chipmaker is still struggling to make up for decreased revenues from plummeting sales of WiMAX products.

The company's net loss for the fourth quarter of 2012 was $9.9 million, considerably worse than its $5.6 million net loss in the year-earlier period. Sequans recorded a 72.8 percent slide in 2012 fourth-quarter revenue--which totaled $3.1 million--compared with the same period in 2011. This was "due to lower sales of WiMAX products, following changes in the WiMAX market in the United States beginning in the second half of 2011," said Sequans.

Nonetheless, the Paris-based company is pinning its hopes on improving LTE sales. "Developments during the fourth quarter support our expectation that our LTE revenue will ramp in the second half of 2013," said Georges Karam, Sequans CEO. He added that there is growing traction for LTE-only devices coming from Tier 1 operators in the United States, Asia and Europe.

"We completed Verizon's (NYSE:VZ) certification process for our high-performance StreamrichLTE product, and we are working with several OEMs to serve the Verizon market opportunity. We won a significant portion of China Mobile's first bid for expanded LTE field trials in China, and additional bids are expected to follow during this year. Our products performed well in field tests in India, where Reliance Infocomm is expected to launch commercial service in the second half of 2013, and we continue to engage with more operators including Softbank in Japan where we completed a successful trial of our LTE interference cancellation technology," said Karam.

He said Sequans expects to continue receiving low-level revenues from WiMAX products sold primarily in emerging markets where existing networks support the operators' business case. Those markets could migrate to LTE in the future, making it possible for them to leverage Sequans' dual-mode WiMAX/LTE solution, which has been tested by WiMAX operators planning a near-term transition to LTE.

Sequans expects revenue for the first quarter of 2013 to be in the range of $2.5 to $3.5 million,

For more:
- see this Sequans release

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