The Business of Tech: AMD & Intel Q3’08

Getting down to the numbers, as predicted for some time by AMD this quarter has been another loss. But it’s a loss that was anything but expected. For the quarter AMD lost a paltry $67 million on revenues of $1.78 billion, completely blowing away their own predictions and what analysts were expecting, losing nearly $100 million less than expected. Compared to their loss last quarter of $1.19 billion and their Q3 loss last year of $400 million, AMD may have as well broken even for the quarter. In fact if you switch to the numbers from their non-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles accounting, then they did indeed make a profit of $80mil for the quarter. The quarter also marks the end of AMD’s operating losses, they posted an operating income of $131 million this quarter.

It seems that as long as AMD doesn’t do too well, Intel can do quite well. Intel posted another big quarter, with $2 billion in profits on $10.2 billion in revenue, for a 12% rise in profit and 1% rise in revenue respectively. Interestingly however, the company missed analyst estimates on revenue, where they were expected to bring in $10.25 billion. Intel has been especially proud of their gross margin for the quarter, which was an unexpectedly high 59% (for the sake of comparison, AMD Is 51%). All things considered, the market seems happy as long as Intel’s gross margins stay this high, even if they miss estimates elsewhere.