SiliconBeat

Trident Microsystems can’t catch a break these days. Now its chief financial officer, Jon
Edmunds, is quitting to join Inphi, a privately-held fabless high speed analog components
company in Southern California, according to an SEC filing Wednesday afternoon.

Last week Trident’s stock fell nearly 12 percent after Goldman Sachs downgraded its rating on the stock. The next day the stock made back most of that when investors bid up its shares in hopes that it might be a takeover target in the wake of STMicro’s acquisition of another Silicon Valley chip maker, Genesis Microchip.

That bump was short-lived, however. A second analyst at Roth Capital cut his rating on the stock Tuesday, and its shares fell back to where the were the week before.

In October, Trident’s shares fell the most since their initial public offering in December
1992 after the company forecast earnings for its fiscal 2008 second quarter that were more than 20 percent lower than analysts had expected.

And in August, the company revealed that both the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange had launched formal investigations into its stock option granting practices.
According to its own internal investigation, Trident determined that the dates of 57 percent of option grants awarded from its initial public offering in December 1992 through June 2006, covering about 38 million shares, were incorrect.

Trident expects to name a replacement for Edmunds before his last day with the company on Jan. 11.

Despite expectations for higher sales in 2008 by nearly every participant in a survey of top semiconductor executives, more than a third expect profits to be flat over the next five years, according to a survey by accounting firm KPMG in conjunction with the Semiconductor Industry Association.

Sales growth of more than 10 percent in the coming year is expected by 52 percent of the executives, down from 60 percent in last year’s survey, according to a press release put out by KPMG Wednesday.

Squeezing profits from those sales is expected to be harder. When asked to project
profitability over the next five years, “”33 percent of the executives said profits would be flat, 26 percent said volatile and unpredictable, 15 percent said profits would decline and 27 percent said profits would rise.”

This can’t be good news for semiconductor equipment manufacturers: only 57
percent of the executive expect capital expenditures to increase next year, down from 72 percent in 2006. And the level of that spending is expected to shrink, with only 36 percent of 2007 executive expecting increases of six percent or more, compared to 53 percent of respondents last year.

The white paper outlining the full survey findings and providing analysis is not due out until January, but when it is, the results will be found at this address: http://www.us.kpmg.com/industries/content.asp?l1id=60&l2id=0

NetSuite, the San Mateo software maker planning an initial public offering as soon as this
week, raised the price range for it Tuesday to $16 to $19 per share, from the $13-to-$16 range it had estimated in a filing on Dec. 5.

That raised the potential proceeds from the NetSuite IPO to $135 million from $114 million under the previous pricing range. When the company first filed its intention to go public in July it estimated it would raise $75 million.

The company, which is majority owned by Oracle founder and chief executive Larry Ellison, is selling its shares through an Internet auction similar to Google’s offering in August 2004. WR Hambrecht +Co, a long-time proponent of the method, is one of the underwriters for the offering.

The company sells on-demand business applications over the Internet and competes with Salesforce.com, led by former-Ellison-underling-and-now-nemesis, Mark Benioff. Sound fun? Read more about it.

Nasdaq pulled the plug on Coherent’s stock listing Tuesday, refusing to reconsider its
decision to delist the company for its failure to be current in its financial filings with the
SEC. The company had been given a pass several times over the past year as its investigation into its option granting practices from January 1995 through September of 2006 prevented Coherent from promptly filing several financial reports required by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company filed one of its delinquent reports last week when it sent the SEC its 10-K annual report for fiscal 2006 where it gave details about results of the investigation by a special committee of its board into its stock option practices. Our blog item last week summarized the findings.

Coherent asked the SEC to stay Nasdaq’s decision to discontinue its listing, but it refused to do so. Starting Wednesday Coherent shares will be on the Pink Sheet Electronic Quotation Service.

The company had hoped to stave off its delisting by assuring regulators that it would file its missing quarterly reports no later than January 31, and its 2007 10-K “shortly thereafter.”

Coherent tried to reassure shareholders in its press release announcing the delisting Tuesday, saying it “intends to relist its common stock on a national exchange as soon as possible and expects it will be in a position to do so shortly after its annual meeting of stockholders scheduled for March 19, 2008.” That would be its first shareholder meeting in nearly two years.

By our count, this makes the third local company to have its stock delisted as a result of
late filings related to back-dating issues. Power Integrations of San Jose was delisted in
August 2006 and again in December 2006 for the same reason, but has since returned to the Nasdaq. Maxim Integrated was delisted in October and expects to reapply for re-listing sometime in the first quarter of 2008 when it says it should become up to date in its financial reporting.

Technology aside, one of Hewlett Packard’s biggest exports over the past few years has been its employees. According to the 10-K the company filed on Tuesday, HP has had at least six rounds of restructurings since 2001. A story we ran last December counted 45,000 announced layoffs.

We fire, because we care. And to save money. But you have to spend money to save money, as they say.

And according to the annual report, those ongoing restructurings have now cost $6.337 billion, in cash and non-cash charges. (The latest chart doesn’t break out how it divides between each).

Okay, but at least HP is a lean, mean fighting machine, right?

Not exactly. Latest headcount from the filing: 172,000 employees worldwide as of October 31, 2007.

Compare that to:
2006: 156,000 employees
2005: 150,000 employees
2004: 151,000 employees

It’s called churn. And while it might make some employees nauseous, it’s been great for HP’s stock, which closed at $51.02 on Tuesday, up from less than $30 per share two years ago. Revenues clocked in at $104.3 billion, up from $86.7 billion two years ago. And profit is up to $7.3 billion from $2.4 billion two years ago.

Barry Cinnamon, chief executive at Akeena Solar of Los Gatos, will sell up to 700,000 of the company’s shares over the next year “to satisfy financial obligations incurred by Mr. Cinnamon as part of his 2006 Divorce Settlement,” according to a filing the company made with the SEC Monday.

Under his plan, “Mr. Cinnamon contemplates selling up to 700,000 shares of common stock over the course of the next year,” which would be equal to about 8 percent of his holdings of Akeena Solar stock and options.

Cinnamon, the company’s founder, started his career in solar energy in the late 1970s as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his Akeena’s latest proxy. His work in solar-energy computer modeling led him into the software industry, where he served as CEO of Software Publishing and founded Allegro New Media, a multimedia software publisher.

Shares of Akeena Solar, which became a public company in August 2006 through a reverse merger with a Nevada corporation named Fairview Energy, have risen 150 percent so far this year.

Palm just filed its 8-K and is discussing earnings on a conference call. Bottom line: Revenue for three months ending Nov. 30 fell from $392.91 million last year to $349.63 million this year. Net income swung from a profit of $12.77 million last year, to a loss of $9.63 million this year.

Read about the carnage here…And here.

Our colleague Steve Johnson gives us an update on the dismantling of PDL BioPharma. In today’s Mercury News, Johnson writes:

“Following up on its vow to raise money by selling its drugs to other companies, PDL BioPharma of Redwood City announced Monday that a Japanese company has agreed to buy a PDL drug used in bone marrow transplants for $200 million in cash.”

After months of squabbling with shareholder activist Daniel Loeb, PDL seemed to be getting some breathing room when Loeb sold the rest of his stock last month.

But what’s this? In a schedule 13-D filed on Tuesday, the fine folks at Highland Capital Management disclosed that they’ve been gobbling up PDL stock. So far, they’ve spent $206.1 million and they now own 8.1 percent.

Wonder what they want?

Last month, chip designer Transmeta (ticker: TMTA) got a letter from one of it major shareholders requesting that it consider a variety of options, such as selling itself or de-listing its stock. The letter came from Riley Investment Management of Los Angeles which owned 5.9 percent of the stock at the time.

Well, let the piling on commence. On Tuesday, two shareholders, Mark Nelson and Dana Johnson, filed a Schedule 13-D disclosing that they had spent almost $9 million acquiring Transmeta stock, giving them 5.5 percent of all shares.

But here’s the bigger bummer for Transmeta: The pair used the filing to say they are on board with Riley’s plan: Either sell or go dark.

Maybe the folks at Transmeta can frame those letters and hang them on the wall next to the plaque they got for recently making The Motley Fool’s list of “5 Deathbed Stocks.”

Larry Ellison’s NetSuite is going public this week. The San Mateo company has already started taking bids in its IPO auction process. Check out our summary of the fun. And don’t forget to read the NetSuite prospectus.