Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) was the recipient of a ratings changes during the seven days:

  • Altera had its “overweight” rating reaffirmed by analysts at Piper Jaffray. They now have a $44.00 price target on the stock.
  • Altera had its price target lowered by analysts at BMO Capital Markets to $38.00. They now have an “outperform” rating on the stock.
  • Altera had its price target lowered by analysts at Jefferies Group from $38.00 to $36.00. They now have a “hold” rating on the stock. They wrote, “Q3 results beat, but guidance for Q4 revenues missed the Street estimate by 8%, ~50% of which was driven by loss of 3 volume FPGA sockets to ASICs at two of Altera’s largest customers. We think investors will be concerned about the risk of such design losses to ASICs, due to a combination of 1) Moore Stress, 2) Decelerating Telco CapEx, and 3) Transition to Low-Cost Base Station. Reit Hold with $36 PT.”
  • Altera had its “hold” rating reaffirmed by analysts at Deutsche Bank. They now have a $33.00 price target on the stock.
  • Altera had its price target lowered by analysts at Nomura to $29.00. They wrote, “Altera reported a good quarter with EPS of $0.49 vs our estimate of $0.46. Upside was driven by communications and networking. Q4 guidance of $455mn (down 6-10%) is much lower than our estimate of $493mn. Importantly, global capex trends are weakening. Spending in North America and China have slowed, while activities are minimal in India. Altera is overvalued (18x), in our view, considering a 5-year revenue CAGR (07-12‟) of 7%, slowing capex spending, and lower margins (down 800 bps in 2012).”

Shares of Altera traded up 2.13% during mid-day trading on Thursday, hitting $31.13. Altera has a one year low of $29.67 and a one year high of $41.63. The company has a market cap of $9.979 billion and a P/E ratio of 17.04.

Altera Corporation is a global semiconductor company. The Company designs, manufactures, and markets high-density programmable logic devices (PLDs), HardCopy ASIC devices, pre-defined design building blocks known as intellectual property (IP) cores, and associated development tools.