NXP sales flat for three years, but debt halved.

NXP turned in its usual $1bn revenues for Q3 – the 13th successive quarter it has had quarterly sales of around $1bn. However NXP has managed to pay off half the $6bn of debt which its private equity owners, KKR, loaded onto the company when they acquired NXP in 2006.

KKR put $6bn of debt on NXP. Now that has been reduced to $2.956bn. The interest bill has been reduced from the original $450-500m a year which it was having to pay in 2008, to a more manageable $280m.

Five years on from the KKR acquisition, NXP is still sacking people with $8m allocated to its employee termination programme (euphemistically described as its ‘Redesign Program’) making a total spent of terminating employees of $720m since KKR acquired the company. Happily NXP says it will only spend another $5m terminating employees under its current plan.

It is thought some 4,500 people have lost their jobs.

Q3 gross profit was $488m, operating profit was $109m and net profit was $302m.

NXP is finding the market volatile. “We do not anticipate a re-acceleration of orders to occur in the short-term until our customers have more confidence in the stability of end-market demand,” says CEO Rick Clemmer.