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SAN FRANCISCO Texas Instruments Inc. on Monday narrowed its sales and earnings outlook for the fourth quarter. The Dallas-based chip maker said it now expects revenue in the range of $ 2.89 billion to $ 3.01 billion, compared with a previous range of $ 2.83 billion to $ 3.07 billion. TI also said it now expects a profit of 5 cents a share to 9 cents a share, compared with a prior outlook of 23 cents a share to 31 cents a share. The company’s earnings per share estimate includes charges worth 21 cents a share in connection with TI’s [...]

Rep. Jeb Hensarling will take over as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, according to recommendations issued by the House Republican Steering Committee’s chairmanship on Tuesday. The Texas congressman will take over from Rep. Spencer Bachus, Republican from Alabama, who has reached his term limit in the position. The change at the top of the committee was largely expected. In addition, Mitt Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, will continue to lead the House Budget Committee. Dave Camp, Republican from Michigan, will continue to lead the House Ways and Means panel while Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican from California, will stay in charge of the House Oversight committee.

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO Texas Instruments is eliminating 1,700 jobs, as it winds down its mobile processor business to focus on chips for more profitable markets like cars and home appliances. Texas Instruments said in September it would halt costly investments in the increasingly competitive smartphone and tablet chip business, leading Wall Street to speculate that part of the company’s processor unit, called OMAP, could be sold. The layoffs are equivalent to nearly 5 percent of the Austin, Texas-based company’s global workforce. “A sale would have been better than a restructuring but a restructuring is certainly better than nothing,” Sanford Bernstein [...]

Feeling the pain from the slumping semiconductor market, Texas Instruments (TXN) disclosed plans on Wednesday to cut about 1,700 jobs in an effort to generate annual savings of $ 450 million. The chip maker said it plans to take total charges of about $ 325 million, mostly in the fourth quarter, to pay for the restructuring. TI said the move is part of management’s efforts to focus the company’s OMAP processors and wireless connectivity solutions on a broader set of applications with long life cycles. That marks a shift from TI’s historical focus on the mobile market, which has been [...]

NEW YORK Texas Instruments said on Wednesday that it would eliminate 1,700 jobs worldwide to cut costs in its wireless chip business as it is moving away from making application chips for smartphones. The chipmaker said it expects to take charges of about $ 325 million related to the job cuts, most of which will be accounted for in the current quarter. It expects annualized savings of about $ 450 million by the end of 2013 from the action. (Reporting By Sinead [...]

SAN FRANCISCO Texas Instruments Inc. reported a jump in earnings despite a small drop in sales for the third quarter. For the period ended Sept. 30, TI reported net income of $ 784 million, or 67 cents per share, compared to net income of $ 601 million, or 51 cents a share, for the same period last year. The results included a charge of 7 cents a share related to the company’s acquisition of National Semiconductor, and a benefit of 22 cents a share “for changes in taxes and a Japanese pension program that were not included in the company’s [...]

SAN FRANCISCO Texas Instruments on Tuesday narrowed its earnings and sales outlook for the third quarter. The chipmaker said it now expects revenue in the range of $ 3.27 billion to $ 3.41 billion, compared with a previous range of $ 3.21 billion to $ 3.47 billion. TI also said it now expects earnings in the range of 38 cents to 42 cents a share, compared with a previous range of 34 cents to 42 cents a share. Shares of TI were up 1.5% in after-hours trading.

Five years after completing a $ 3.5 billion chipmaking factory in Texas, Samsung Electronics is investing another $ 4 billion in the Austin plant to ramp up production and meet growing demand for tablets and smartphones. The upgrades will mainly focus on increasing the facility’s capacity for making processors for advanced mobile applications. Mass production is scheduled to start in the second half of the year. “The added ability in production will allow our customers to better respond to market needs,” Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s president, Dr. Woosung Han, said in a statment. The investment, which is the largest-ever single foreign [...]

International Business Machines Corp (IBM) has agreed to buy privately held Texas Memory Systems, a high-end enterprise storage technology provider, to expand its own storage offerings, IBM said on Thursday. Armonk, New York-based IBM did not disclose the terms of the deal with Texas Memory, which employs about 100 people. The deal is expected to close later this year, IBM said. Texas Memory told Reuters in December that it was looking to be bought by a bigger company so it could take advantage of a bigger sales force to sell its products to corporate customers.