Asia-Pacific sales boost AMD

Strong Asia-Pacific sales have helped drive Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to better than expected results for its US first quarter.

AMD earned US$45 million on a 73 percent increase in sales to US$1.23 billion.

Earnings of 12 US cents per diluted share for the quarter ended 28 March blew away the 3 US cents per diluted share Wall Street consensus estimate, according to an analyst survey by Thomson First Call.

In the year ago quarter, AMD posted a net loss of US$146 million, or 42 US cents per share, on sales of US$715 million.

'Our performance in the first quarter of 2004 was driven by record sales, solid growth and strong execution,' Robert Rivet,  CFO at AMD, said in a  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 the Asia-Pacific and Latin America.'

Rivet said that AMD64 platform adoption continued to accelerate, with processor unit volume shipments more than doubling quarter on quarter. Both HP and Sun began shipping AMD Opteron processor-based servers for the first time in the quarter.

Rival Intel, which claimed it did not lose its 90 percent-plus market share hold in the first quarter to AMD, on 13 April reported earnings of US$1.7 billion on sales of US$8.1 billion for the first quarter.

AMD said demand for its AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64 and AMD Athlon XP families of microprocessors was strong.

Average prices on AMD processors increased for the fourth straight quarter, enhanced by what AMD called continued penetration of the enterprise market.

AMD said its transition to 90nm production for AMD64 processors was on track with strong yields demonstrating excellent power consumption and heat dissipation characteristics.

AMD would be initiating volume 90nm production in the second quarter and expected to deliver products for revenue in the third quarter, the company said.

AMD said its gross margin improved by about two percent over the fourth quarter, to 37.8 percent.

The company expected seasonal patterns to prevail and sales to be relatively flat in the current quarter. Sales in its memory group were also expected to increase slightly.

The computation products group expected sales to decline modestly in line with industry seasonal patterns, AMD said.