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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (237865)	7/31/2007 3:00:07 PM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

>> except the minor difference of one being illegal and the other being legal... Are you making a financial stake on that ? or is that in the category of cheering/booing casually from the sidelines ?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (237865)	7/31/2007 3:26:08 PM
From: smooth2o	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

re: except the minor difference of one being illegal and the other being legal... Since they're the same, one can't be different than the other. Fact is, sales in the uP world are very often not determined on price and price is the very last thing that a good sales person adds to the mix. Although, I can see what you're saying... that may not be the case for AMD. Smooth

To: Joe NYC who wrote (237865)	7/31/2007 7:26:29 PM
From: pgerassi	Respond to of 275872

Dear Joe: Both are illegal. Any tying of discount to a particular company's actions is illegal. The only allowed actions are on the basis of product purchased from Intel. There can be no history that alters the numbers whether first dollar discounts, percentage of previous sales or percentage of total company sales. If Dell and Gateway buys 1 million CPUs under the same basic terms, they both should receive the same discount. It doesn't happen when both are on different schedules based on their total purchased to date, percentage of what they sold or percentage of what they used to buy. I used both of the latter two techniques in my examples to show that either leads to glaring results. The universal discount schedule doesn't lead to such glaring results. Any unusual results occur naturally around the step points. Sliding scale discounts avoid even those inconsistencies where it is cheaper in total to buy a few more parts. And this is the law which this treating of individual customers differently violates: en.wikipedia.org The very first prohibition line is quite clear. Individual discount schedules tend for the first part to be violated and history shows that HP, Compaq, Gateway, IBM and many other companies had their PC divisions losing money that were reversed after the actions were stopped. Since the appearance is enough to get you convicted of antitrust violations (preponderance of evidence), anything that appears to violate the law should be avoided. Individual discount schedules is something that can be easily shown to violate the act. My examples show that. the 3M case goes to show how hard it is to show that individual schedules are not in violation of the first prohibition. The other parts of that case also violated the second prohibition of the act. Those are the commonly referred violations in that case. It is clear that Intel violated both prohibitions. Pete