Amdahl Corp has joined the chorus of woe about rotten trading conditions in the current quarter, warning that it is likely to report a loss for the fourth quarter but a modest profit for the year. It made a net profit for the first nine months of 1991 of $23.3m on sales of $1,313m, which means the loss is likely to be around the $20m mark. The dire state of the world economy was compounded for Amdahl by the faulty component that required a recall of its recently- shipped 6380K disk drives. It took much of the quarter’s production to replace the entire installed base of suspect drives: the drives would otherwise have filled new orders. It started shipping its new higher capacity 6390 disk drives earlier this week and the first 5995M mainframe will reach the customer by the weekend. The company says that it believes strong demand for the new products will enable a return to profitability for the first quarter of 1992.
