Amdahl Corp’s third quarter figures make predictably depressing reading with net profits plummeting to $5.49m from $46.4m last year, or 5 cents per share versus 42 cents in October 1990: the company says that the European marketplace, which represented a third of Amdahl’s business last year, is responsible for the dramatic fall, although the US, Canada and Pacific Basin are said to have held up well, even if the figures suggest otherwise; Amdahl is not optimistic and sounds a cautionary note on unsettled economic conditions and pricing pressure; the company has yet to ship its top-end 5995M models, and says that the transition will continue adversely to affect earnings; while the mainframes and new disk drives will be available in limited quantities in the current quarter, they won’t be generally available until the first quarter 1992, which means that the results won’t show a dramatic improvement until the second quarter; however, given the state of the IBM Corp mainframe market, a complete recovery by the second quarter 1992 seems over-optimistic.
