I ran across this while cleaning up my e-mail. From the article I am not sure what "expansion plans" this is referring to: the new FASL fab or something else?
PT
BLS: infobeat.com
03:42 AM ET 06/05/00
INTERVIEW-AMD plans expansion partnership
By Michael Kramer
TAIPEI, June 5 (Reuters) - U.S. microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) said on Monday it was discussing capacity expansion plans with a partner as customer orders continued to pile in after its best-ever quarter.
"Demand is very high," said Hector Ruiz, AMD's president and chief operating officer. "We are pushing our fabs (wafer fabrication plants) to the wall.
"We are moving to expand capacity but it involves sensitive talks with partners so I am not prepared to give details," Ruiz told Reuters in an interview in Taipei.
The potential partnership would come after AMD and Japan's Fujitsu Ltd <6702.T> announced on May 23 they would build a $1.3 billion plant to make flash memory chips, which give devices such as mobile phones "instant-on" capabilities.
AMD, Intel Corp.'s chief rival in the microprocessor business, said in April its 2000 first quarter net income rose to $189.3 million versus a loss of $128.4 million a year ago.
Ruiz said demand for AMD's microprocessors was strong across the board, from its speedy one-gigahertz Athlon to older, slower K6 models.
"Order books are fairly tight but clients will not be shortchanged," Ruiz said. He also played down the chances of a price hike, saying AMD was still in a "learning curve" for chip pricing.
AMD has benefitted from a supply crunch at number one chipmaker Intel that sent many customers looking for alternative sources. It also beat Intel to the punch in launching a one-gigahertz chip.
INTEL NO PUSHOVER
Ruiz said AMD was far from complacent, however, and called the company's target of bagging 30 percent of the world's microprocessor shipments a "demanding goal."
"If you look at Intel's results they are having a very good year," he said. "A lot of companies would like to 'stumble' like that."
Intel announced on May 20 that its first-quarter sales were $7.99 billion, revising the figure down from an early $8.02 billion due to costs from shipping circuit boards that had a chipset defect. It posted $7.01 billion in sales for the same 1999 period.
AMD's expensive Dresden, Germany plant has begun shipping new products just as motherboard and PC makers are complaining of a chip drought. The company debuted the first shipments from Dresden's Fab 30 at Taipei's Computex trade show on Monday.
The new products include Athlon processors with on-board cache memory, which speeds up computing by keeping some information on the processor instead of retrieving it from other components.
It also unveiled a range of lower-end "Duron" processors.
((Taipei newsroom, +886 2 2508-0815 fax +886 2 2508-0204,
taipei.newsroom@reuters.com)) |
