You can have any number of favorable reviews in PC publications and a line of new customers banging on your door but if you can’t actually deliver the product it all counts for nothing as far as the bottom line is concerned. And despite getting rave reviews and signing new customers agreements with the likes of IBM, Advanced Micro Devices Inc didn’t manage to get as many good 233MHz Pentium Pro-compatible K6 processors from its manufacturing process as it had hoped, yesterday reporting a third quarter loss of $31.76m, down from $38.36m last time, on sales up 31% at $596.64m compared with $456.86m (CI No 3,239). The loss was wider than Wall Street had expected despite AMD’s earlier warning. Although it ramped production from 350,000 K6s in the second quarter to 1m in the third quarter, that was still short of its target. It did $150m on its well-regarded K6 MMX- enabled Pentium II clone. Intel’s savage price-cutting also took its toll as AMD was forced to follow suit (CI No 3,245). It’s going to have to improve yields to be able to get the 2 million chips it wants to ship this quarter, and is also in the middle of transitioning from an 0.35 micron process to 0.2 microns. For the nine months the company reported net losses of $8.75m compared with a loss of $47.7m last time, on revenue up 20% at $1.74bn compared with $1.45bn last time.
