SiliconBeat

First, the bad news: Actel, the Mountain View maker of “power-smart” chips, lowered its sales guidance for its third quarter ending this month. It now expects sales to drop by 7 to 9 percent from the prior quarter, a bigger slide than the 1 to 3 percent drop it had previously forecast. The company attributes the slower sales picture “primarily to weakness in the Asian consumer market.”

Now the good news: it says its gross margin for the quarter, or the difference between the amount it gets paid for its chips minus what it costs to produce them expressed as a percentage of sales, is expected to come in at 58 percent, one percentage point better than previously forecast.

After-hours traders bid down Actel shares 10 percent based on figures found on Yahoo Finance as of around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.