Chips lead AMD's financial climb

By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Oct 2005 at 12:38

AMD remains in the black according to its latest third quarter financial results, with sales of $1.523bn and a profit of $76 million.

In a nutshell: microprocessors good, memory bad. Which is much the same as the second quarter back in July in fact - Opteron powers AMD financials. Once again the Computation Product Group was the company's star performer, seeing record server, mobile and desktop processor sales.

The AMD Turion was also credited with gaining traction in the notebook processor market - it recorded a 72 per cent sequential increase, with sales particularly strong in Russia, India and Greater China.

'This was another record-breaking quarter for AMD's microprocessor business,' said AMD's chief financial officer, Robert J. Rivet. 'Exceptional customer demand for our server, mobile and desktop processors helped drive microprocessor sales growth of 44 percent compared to the third quarter of 2004 and 26 percent compared to the second quarter of 2005. We established new quarterly records in unit and dollar sales, gross margin and operating income.'

Third quarter sales rose 23 per cent compared to a year ago, and the operating income increased 16 per cent on the third quarter of 2004. It all translates to $0.18 per diluted share, for the quarter ended September 25, 2005. Both revenues and profits exceeded Wall Street expectations, reported the New York Times.

The Memory Products Group saw sales decrease 4 per cent, and AMD is in the process of shedding its Spansion Flash memory subsidiary, which it jointly owns with Fujitsu - the companies having merged their memory operations in July 2003.

You can read the full financial 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 to grow between seven and 13 per cent compared to this quarter. Given that we are approaching the Christmas season, a more meaningful perspective is that it expects a 42 to 50 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2004.