Opteron powers AMD financials

By Alun Williams

Posted on 14 Jul 2005 at 15:54

AMD is back in the black. Intel's rival has reported a net income of $11m - generated from sales of $1.260bn - for its second quarter of 2005 (ending 26 June). This amounts to a profit of 3 cents a share.

The jewel in the quarter's crown was the Opteron server processor, which lead the success of the Computation Products Group (CPG). This saw record sales of $767m - an increase of 38 per cent on the same period in 2004 - a record operating income of $110m.

Geographically, sales were especially strong in China and North America.

'Our microprocessor business delivered another record quarter driven by increased demand for AMD server and mobile processors from our largest global OEM customers,' said AMD's chief financial officer, Robert J. Rivet. 'Once again we continued to gain momentum with microprocessor sales growth increasing 38 percent compared to the second quarter of 2004.'

Rivet also highlighted that the dual-core Opteron server processors contributed to an 89 per cent revenue increase on the previous three months. He also talked up sales of the company's newly designed mobile processor, the Turion 64. Citing '60 design wins', he said the chip drove record mobile sales in the thin-and-light mobile PC category.

While CPG figures waxed, however, Memory Products Group sales waned. Sales of $462m represented a 31 per cent decrease from the second quarter of 2004, and resulted in the group incurring an operating loss of $90m. MirrorBit Flash memory sales were highlighted by AMD as a relative success, growing to more than 20 percent of total Memory Products Group sales in the quarter.

The results played well on Wall Street, exceeding many analysts' expectations, and shares rose more than 3 per cent in after-hours trading.

You can read the full figures in a PDF on the AMD website.

In terms of outlook for the next quarter, AMD would only state that it expects microprocessor sales growth to exceed normal seasonal patterns.