14 DAY TRIAL // Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices posted a wider quarterly loss as a result of the $1.68 billion charge for having purchased the Canadian graphics chips company ATI.
While Intel managed to generate revenue of $10.1 billion, operating income of $2.2 billion and net income of $1.9 billion, AMD could only whisper its quarterly revenue of $1.770 billion, a net loss of $1.722 billion and an operating loss of $1.678 billion. As for the whole 2007, AMD recorded revenue of $6.012 billion and a net loss of $3.379 billion. ATI also went down, and analysts say that the company is worth 30 percent less than the $5.4 billion the CPU manufacturer paid for it back in 2006.
"We were close to break-even operationally for the quarter, reducing our fourth quarter non-GAAP operating loss to $9 million. We improved gross margin by three points sequentially, driven by increased shipments of new products, higher average selling prices and cost containment actions," said Robert J. Rivet, AMD CFO Robert Rivet. "We shipped a record number of microprocessor units in the quarter, including nearly four hundred thousand quad-core processors."
Rivet estimated during the third quarter of 2007 that the company might suffer a short breaking during Q4, but more recently, both Rivet and AMD CEO Hector Ruiz seemed more pessimistic and denied having promised that the company would break during the forth quarter. According to the company, AMD shipped "a record number of microprocessors" (we already got used to this) during the last quarter, including 400,000 quad-core CPUs.
The company's computing division was responsible for $1.4 billion or 79% of the company's revenue, while the graphics business accounted for sales of $259 million, which is a 3 percent increase as compared to the third quarter of 2007.
AMD fell on the stock market 23 cents, or 3.5 percent, while in after hours trading its stock was up $0.11 or 1.7%. The stock closed at $6.34, down 3.5%, which left AMD with a market capitalization of $3.52 billion.