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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (146736)	5/1/2002 2:55:02 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1578334

AMD's Sanders sees market share gains for 2002 By Duncan Martell SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 (Reuters) - You couldn't really expect Jerry Sanders, the flamboyant chairman of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. <AMD.N>, who last week stepped down as chief executive of the company he founded 33 years ago, to go quietly. Striking his trademark combative posture toward the company he refers to as "the 800-pound gorilla," and dispensing his signature anti-Intel riffs, Sanders told investors on Tuesday he expects his firm to gain revenue and market share this year against its longtime competitor Intel Corp. <INTC.O> Sanders, 65, who turned over the reins last week to his hand-picked successor Hector Ruiz, also said that he plans to emulate Intel by aggressively going after emerging Asian markets, where Intel already has a strong marketing and sales presence, including one plant in Shanghai. "We see Asia as a great opportunity for us," Sanders said at a Merrill Lynch hardware technology conference in San Francisco. "We do expect to grow our revenues and gain market share in 2002." In addition to those assertions, Sanders said AMD's next-generation processor, code-named Hammer, will make its debut at a clock speed of 2 gigahertz or higher, which should put it in good position with a number of Intel's Pentium 4 chips, the fastest of which now runs at 2.4 gigahertz. "That's certainly a reasonable starting point," said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron, of the 2.0 gigahertz introduction speed that Sanders outlined. "Based on that, it sounds like it's going to be in the right range of performance." 'AMD WILL SCREAM' The Hammer chip, which Sanders said will be shipped to personal computer makers toward the end of this year and PCs with the chip will be available in the first quarter of 2003. The Hammer chip will roll out first to desktop computers, then to servers and finally to mobile PCs. "Once demand returns, AMD will scream," Sanders said. AMD had for years, up until recently, a business model of emulating Intel's older processors, then selling them at an approximate 25 percent discount to Intel chips. No more. Since its introduction of the Athlon in 1999 and the resolution of manufacturing problems that had hobbled it for years, Sunnyvale, California-based AMD has been steadily winning market share from its cross-county rival Intel. In the first quarter, McCarron cited a study his firm did showing that AMD gained 0.2 percentage point of market share in the first quarter, and now has 18.2 percent of the market for microprocessors. Intel's share slipped 0.4 percentage points to 80.8 percent in the same period. Those figures include shipments of Microsoft's Xbox video game console, which uses Intel's Pentium III processor. Excluding Xbox shipments, Intel's share fell 0.8 percentage points to 79.8 percent of the market while AMD gained 0.7 percentage points to 19.2 percent of the market. Both figures exclude PowerPC processor shipments to Apple Computer Inc., McCarron said. "AMD's share is a lot more resilient than it used to be, that is, when they lose share it doesn't mark the beginning of a trend," McCarron said. "They're pretty clearly a much more stable company with respect to their market presence than they have been historically." Sanders pointed out that in 2001, when global chip sales tumbled 32 percent to about $140 billion, their biggest-ever one-year decline, AMD's sales only fell 16 percent. However, it did post losses, unlike Santa Clara, California-based Intel. Intel's sales tumbled 20 percent last year, but still ended 2001 with $1.3 billion in net income and generated $8 billion in cash. Year-to-date, AMD stock has declined 29 percent, compared with a 6 percent decline in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Intel shares have fallen 9 percent year-to-date. 04/30/02 20:27 ET Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited.