Tough measures for tough times at AMD

These are tough times at AMD, even if it has managed to turn the heat on rival Intel in the marketplace. The company has suffered a loss of $105 million in the third quarter ended September 1999 and has had to resort to tough measures. All this at a time when its Athlon processors and flash-memory products have had a fair bit of success.

The loss works out to 72 cents per share. Sales fell 3 per cent from $685.93 million to $662.19 million .

AMD has decided to sell its communications group, which has 400 employees. This group accounted for a little over 10 per cent of the company's revenue in the third quarter.

The communications group is expected to be sold by the first half of 2000, the company said. This sale will include the communications products division that supplies ICs for telecom applications, and the network products unit, which makes ICs for data communications and computer connectivity.

AMD has had problems on the manufacturing front too, and was unable to ship as many Athlon processors as projected. The company said the recent earthquake in Taiwan "shut off motherboard shipments in the final week" of the third quarter. However, the company expects to meet its target of producing more than 1 million Athlon processors in the fourth quarter.

The company said revenue in its flash-memory unit grew strongly owing to growing demand and shortage of electronic components.