AMD is driving a broken car with no steering wheel, no gas paddle, no break!
How much money AMD making, I meaning losing, is totally determined by Intel's will.
I see AMD stock price is rapidly approaching NSM's stock price.
More and more downgrades will come to get AMD.
Good luck,
AMD posts a loss on falling sales
By Andy Santoni
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 4:53 PM PT, Jul 8, 1998
Despite substantial growth in sales of its K6 processors, Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday reported a net loss on lower
sales for its second quarter, ended June 28.
The company lost $64.56 million, or 45 cents per share, on sales of $526.54 million this year, compared with a net income of
$9.97 million, or seven cents per share, on sales of $594.56 million in the same quarter last year.
Sales declined by 3 percent from the immediately prior quarter, and by 11 percent from the second quarter of 1997.
For the first six months of 1998, AMD reported total revenues of $1.07 billion, a decline of 7 percent from the first six
months of 1997, and a net loss of 89 cents per share. For the same period a year ago, the company reported revenues of
$1.15 billion and net income of $22.92 million, or 16 cents per share.
"The substantial growth in sales of AMD-K6 processors in the just-completed quarter couldn't offset the decline in sales from
our Communications group, our Memory group, and Vantis, our programmable logic company," said W.J. Sanders III,
chairman and chief executive. "Weakening demand in the worldwide semiconductor industry, coupled with continued price
pressures on flash memory products, produced a substantial decline in revenues from our nonmicroprocessor business units."
Except for its K6 business, "demand is as weak as I've ever seen," Sanders said. "We're bumping along the bottom."
"Shipments of AMD-K6 family processors increased by more than one million units over the immediate-prior quarter to nearly
2.7 million units," Sanders said. However, the company did not earn a profit on those sales and was only marginally profitable
in its sales of nonprocessor products, he noted.
On the bright side, AMD made advances in semiconductor processing technology, which Sanders called the lifeblood of the
industry.
"We achieved a successful transition to 0.25-micron technology early in the quarter," Sanders said. "Approximately 40 percent
of unit shipments during the just-completed quarter were products manufactured on 0.25-micron technology. All of our
shipments of AMD-K6 processors in the current quarter will be on 0.25-micron technology."
AMD also continues to enhance its processor products, for the first time offering a performance advantage over Intel
products, Sanders said.
"On May 28, we successfully introduced our next-generation AMD-K6-2 processor family with 3DNow! technology,"
Sanders said. "The AMD-K6-2 processor is our first differentiated processor for Microsoft Windows computing, and features
additional new instructions developed by AMD and supported by Microsoft to enhance 3-D imaging and sound."
"We shipped more than 500,000 AMD-K6-2 processors in the quarter, marking the steepest first-quarter sales ramp of a new
processor in AMD history," Sanders continued. "In response to demand from customers, we are rapidly shifting production to
AMD-K6-2 processors. Among others, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu have announced desktop systems based on the
AMD-K6-2 processor, and we expect additional top-tier manufacturers to follow."
"Today, the world's top three -- and five of the top 10 -- manufacturers of desktop PCs are now offering systems powered
by AMD processors. We are continuing efforts to expand our customer base to absorb the significant increases in output we
plan to achieve during the remainder of the year," Sanders concluded.
AMD is also on track with the next version of its K6 processor and with the next-generation K7 CPU, Sanders said.
The "Sharktooth" processor, a K6-2 CPU with 256KB of on-chip Level 2 cache, should begin shipping in the fourth quarter,
Sanders said. The K7 is scheduled to be described at the Microprocessor Forum in October, demonstrated in systems at
Comdex, and introduced formally in the first half of next year, he added.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif., can be reached at (408) 732-2400 or amd.com.
Andy Santoni is a senior writer at InfoWorld. |
