AMD Posts Profit for Q4 2009 – First in 13 Quarters

I’m a bit late on reporting this, but it still should be reported. After going 13 full quarters, posting a loss with each one, AMD managed to post a long-overdue profit during Q4 2009. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it looks like the only reason that happened was thanks to Intel’s mammoth $1.224 billion settlement, which it made just a few months ago.

Just how much did that settlement contributed to the posted profit? Well, AMD’s total profit was $1.288 billion, meaning that if it wasn’t for the settlement, this would have been another quarter with a loss. To be fair to AMD, though, it’s processor sales have been on the up, thanks in part to their great value, and the fact that there seems to be a model for every possible budget (except high-end, of course).

It’s hard to know at this point just where the growth is coming from, but for AMD’s sake, it’s good to see. Part of it could be the recovering economy, or heck, it could be the lack of recovery, causing people to go with lesser-expensive parts. I’m sure Windows 7 also had something to do with it, because with new OSes, comes new PCs and the need for processors.

Being a realist, I have to wonder when the time will come when AMD can post a real profit. Over the past couple of years, the company has focused very hard on pushing out processors based on architectures that haven’t changed all too much through the past generation. Phenom II brought some greater performance to the table, but the difference isn’t as stark as what we saw with Intel’s Nehalem, for example. When is AMD going to release it’s first real strike to Intel in quite a while? I’d love to know.

In the third quarter of 2009, AMD had revenue of $1.396 billion, a net loss attributable to AMD common stockholders of $128 million and an operating loss of $77 million. In the fourth quarter of 2008, AMD had revenue of $1.162 billion, a net loss attributable to AMD common stockholders of $1.436 billion and an operating loss of $1.274 billion.