AMD down on profits...

... but the chip maker is still doing better than expected. Go AMD!

Things are bad, but could be worse for AMD as the little big chip firm reported yet another quarterly loss, but beat pessimistic analyst predictions last night.

With a Q1 loss of $US416 million - $US0.66 per share - and things not looking much chipper for Q2, AMD hardly had reason to crack open the bubbly, but the firm's CFO, Robert Rivet, said his firm would become cash flow positive again in the second quarter when restructuring started to take effect. We seem to have heard that before.

AMD's first quarter was more-or-less flat compared to last year's fourth quarter but down 21 per cent from Q1 '08, with the firm reporting $US1.177 billion in revenues.

Operating losses for the quarter totaled $US308 million and gross margins were 43 per cent. Excluding GlobalFoundries, however, gross margins came to just 34 per cent.

"The outlook is murky at best," said a depressed AMD CEO, Dirk Meyer, confessing, "Server was the weak spot." Growth in notebooks and desktops had saved the firm from more dire results.

Indeed, revenue from computing kit totaled $US938 million while graphics systems pulled in $US222 million.

Meyer did have a stab at optimism declaring, "we continued to beat or exceed our roadmaps for the quarter".

AMD's CFO was more upbeat, noting AMD was entering 2009, "a very different company than the one you were following as recently as a year ago-a much nimbler company."

In fact there's barely anyone left at all, he nearly said.
Despite predicting the firm would be cash positive again by the second half of the year, Rivet was careful not to be overly optimistic about the firm's second quarter predictions.

"We believe there's still some supply chain things to work through. We're just being cautious at this point, and saying potentially we'll be down," he said.