AMD Posts Wildly Better Than Expected Results

Advanced Micro Devices posted wildly better than expected results for the first quarter, earning $45 million on a 73 percent increase in sales to $1.23 billion.

The earnings of 12 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended March 28 blew away the 3 cents per diluted share Wall Street consensus estimate, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson First Call. In the year ago quarter, AMD posted a net loss of $146 million, or 42 cents per share, on sales of $715 million.

AMD shares closed down 4 cents per share Wednesday at $17.12, hovering near the 52 week high of $18.50.

"Our performance in the first quarter of 2004 was driven by record sales, solid growth and strong execution," Robert Rivet, AMD's CFO, said in a prepared statement. "Our Flash memory and microprocessor businesses delivered solid sales results in a seasonally down quarter and both business lines were profitable. Sales were especially strong in Asia Pacific and Latin America."

Rivet said that adoption of the AMD64 platform continued to accelerate, with processor unit volume shipments more than doubling quarter on quarter. Both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems began shipping AMD Opteron processor-based servers for the first time in the quarter.Processor giant Intel, which claims it did not lose its 90 percent plus market share hold in the first quarter to AMD, on Tuesday reported earnings of $1.7 billion on sales of $8. 1 billion for the first quarter.

Nevertheless, AMD said demand for its AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64 and AMD Athlon XP families of microprocessors were strong. Average selling prices on AMD processors increased for the fourth straight quarter enhanced by what AMD called continued penetration of the enterprise market.

AMD said its manufacturing transition to 90nm production for AMD64 processors is on-track with strong yields demonstrating excellent power consumption and heat dissipation characteristics. AMD will be initiating volume 90nm production in the second quarter and expects to deliver products for revenue in the third quarter.

AMD said its gross margin improved by more than 2 percentage points over the fourth quarter to 37.8 percent.

As for the current quarter, AMD said in aggregate it expects seasonal patterns to prevail and sales to be approximately flat. The company expects sales in its memory group to increase modestly, while in its computation products group it expects sales to decline modestly in line with industry seasonal patterns. Article appears courtesy of CRN. 0