AMD bucks trend with record earnings

Advanced Micro Devices has reported record earnings for its third quarter ended 1 October, bucking a seemingly grim trend of profit warnings from chip and PC manufacturers.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has reported record earnings for its third quarter ended 1 October, bucking a seemingly grim trend of profit warnings from chip and PC manufacturers.

AMD said its profit rose to $409m compared with a loss of $106m a year ago. Excluding charges, and the gains from the sale of its Legerity voice communications business, AMD reported an operating profit of $219m. Turnover leapt from $662m a year ago to $1.21bn, due in part to strong sales of PC processor and flash memory devices.

Demand for the latter, which are used in cellular phones and other devices, more than doubled against figures from the same quarter last year, and AMD expects the demand to exceed supply by the end of the year.

The company, whose Athlon and lower-end Duron processors are used extensively in PCs, said it expects to sell all the Athlon processors it can make and that it will exceed earlier sales projections.

Its strong results contrast with those of arch rival Intel, which warned that its forthcoming results will be affected by disappointing sales in Europe. Apple and Dell have also recently issued profit warnings.

Thomas Reuner, an analyst at researcher Dataquest, said: "The commercial market has been hit by the continuing year 2000 lock-down effect and the slower than expected adoption of Windows 2000. AMD, in the consumer space, does not have those problems."