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Last updated: Thursday, April 23, 2009

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s loss widened in the first quarter as demand and prices for its microprocessors slumped and charges for the biggest restructuring in the company’s 40-year history took their toll. Its shares slipped 5 percent in after-hours trading on disappointing guidance. AMD reported after the market closed Tuesday that it lost $416 million, or 66 cents per share, in the opening three months of the year. It wasn’t as bad as Wall Street projected. Without one-time charges, the loss would have been 62 cents per share. On that basis, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a loss of 66 cents per share. During the same period last year, AMD lost $364 million, or 60 cents per share. Sales dropped 21 percent to $1.18 billion, but were still higher than estimates of $978 million. The Sunnyvale-based company forecast lower second-quarter sales, which likely disappointed investors who were expecting more optimistic guidance — along the lines of AMD’s bigger rival Intel Corp. Last week, Intel projected that its sales would be flat, and Chief Executive Paul Otellini said the personal computer market might have “bottomed out” after its worst stretch in six years. Analysts were expecting AMD to record $975 million in second-quarter sales, down about 28 percent from the $1.35 billion in revenue from the second quarter of 2008. The guidance raised questions about whether AMD expects to lose market share to Intel, a prospect that AMD’s CEO Dirk Meyer sought to knock down. Intel has about 80 percent of the worldwide market for personal computer microprocessors — the brains of those machines. AMD has roughly the rest. “The economy is still weak, making it very difficult to forecast end-user demand,” Meyer said on a conference call with analysts, noting that the first and second quarters are typically the weakest for chip makers. “I’ve heard some say…

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AMD Posts Deeper Loss, Shares Fall

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