AMD chips to be in many more computers this summer-sources
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc may make some of its largest inroads into the fast-growing laptop computer market thanks to a new generation of power-efficient chips to be unveiled next week.
People familiar with the matter who work for AMD said the company’s latest microprocessors are expected to be included in 109 mainstream laptop models in the coming months, the company’s best showing during the crucial back-to-school sales season. Last year, AMD’s chips were available in 40 laptop models.
“This is the first time we’ve seen this much attention to our notebooks,” the source said, referencing the company’s laptop chips.
And while shifts in market share are yet to be seen, “typically more design wins dictates more sales,” the source said, adding the company’s offerings are growing steadily across the major PC manufacturers.
The perennial second-fiddle to market giant Intel Corp has struggled to gain market share within laptop PCs, which have outpaced the growth of desktop PCs in recent years.
AMD’s stock has underperformed Intel since the beginning of the year, losing 14.57 percent of its value, where Intel has gained 5.44 percent.
However, AMD’s stock more than doubled off its 52-week low of $3.22 to close Thursday’s session at $8.27 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Seagate hopes to broaden reach with new hard drives
Have you ever looked at your hard drive and said “I wish it could do more”?
Seagate thinks it has the answer.
With its new “GoFlex” external hard drives for consumers, Seagate said it is hoping to expand appeal by simplifying how their products connnect to computers.
Housed externally, rather than inside of a laptop computer, Seagate said the new drives will feature attachments to connect to the internet and a television.
Each attachment will be sold separately, but the idea is not unlike the strategy offered by Apple for iPhones, iPads and iPods that connect to various different docks to connect to stereo systems, GPS devices and car stereos.
Seagate said it hopes the GoFlex connectors will catch on enough that other companies will want to design their own types of attachments for various uses, such as connecting directly into a computer instead of through a cord.
U.S. chip shares sink as Samsung stokes glut fear
SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 (Reuters) – Shares in U.S. chip makers slid on Friday after Samsung Electronics Co Ltd <005930.KS> said it will “substantially increase” capital spending in 2010, stoking fears about excess semiconductor supply.
The world’s largest maker of memory chips and flatscreen TVs also warned that the low-end DRAM memory chip market may go into oversupply by the year’s end. Local newspaper Korea Economic Daily cited chip gear suppliers as saying Samsung was preparing to invest as much as $17.3 billion to increase semiconductor capacity in the period leading up to 2011.
Samsung said in a statement it had not reached a decision on that, and would not disclose further information for another six months. [ID:nLDE63T01G]
Analysts say investors cashed out on Friday of shares such as Intel Corp <INTC.O> and memory chip maker Micron Technology Inc <MU.O> after the South Korea’s Samsung said that inventory could grow in the second half of the year. [ID:nTOE63S005]
“Samsung said they are pushing up capital spending and could see oversupply by the back half of the year,” said Broadpoint Amtech analyst Doug Freedman.
“Some of the inventory data coming out of some of the semiconductor supply chain companies is concerning people,” he added. Investors were “taking profits.”
Analysts have quizzed every major chip manufacturer during the quarterly earnings season about the possibility that companies will over-build, swelling inventories again.
U.S. chip gearmaker KLA-Tencor beats Street
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29 (Reuters) -Chip equipment maker KLA-Tencor Corp <KLAC.O> reported better-than-expected results on improved demand from manufacturing customers for newer technologies, sending shares up 2 percent on Thursday.
Along with Varian Semiconductor [ID:nSGE63S0NJ], which saw its revenue triple, the results show the industry’s willingness to increase production capacity as demand for computers, smartphones and storage drives picks up.
KLA-Tencor, which competes with Applied Materials Inc <AMAT.O> to provide systems that monitor and analyze chip products, reported net income of $57.02 million, or 33 cents a share, in its fiscal third quarter ended March 31, compared to a loss of $82.83 million, or 49 cents a share in the year-ago period.
The company forecast revenues for the current quarter of $530 million to $570 million, with earnings of 54 cents to 62 cents, excluding items.
“What we see is that there’s strong demand out there,” Chief Executive Richard Wallace said in a conference call with analysts.
Although manufacturing facilities are coming on line, and the June quarter was looking “very good,” he wasn’t ready to make predictions about the second half of the year.
“I don’t think it’s as much about seasonality as it is just increased confidence in our customers that now is the time for them to invest,” he said.
Chipmaker LSI beats Street, sees strong second half
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 (Reuters) – LSI Corp <LSI.N> reported better-than-expected results as demand increased among its business customers, a course the company expects to continue throughout the rest of the year.
The company, whose chips are used in hard drives and networking hardware, said on Wednesday that it expects roughly seasonable growth in the second quarter as it works to grow past pre-recession levels.
“I’ll take normal seasonality any day of the week in this environment — normal is good,” said Raymond James analyst Hans Mosesmann.
He added that the first quarter was higher than seasonal, and any growth off of that will be good.
LSI Chief Executive Abhi Talwalkar told Reuters in an interview that he is already seeing increased spending on servers and memory equipment.
“I’m fairly confident we’ll see growth in the second half because the overall environment continues to be positive,” he said.
LSI derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from business spending.
Qualcomm beats Street but outlook is weak, shares fall
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Qualcomm Inc <QCOM.O> issued lower-than-expected revenue forecasts as cellphone chip prices stayed weak, sending its shares down more than 7 percent.
The forecasts for the current quarter and full year disappointed investors who had hoped that economic recovery in the United States and Europe would stabilize prices for Qualcomm’s chips and shore up royalties on patents.
Analysts had feared competition from the likes of ST-Ericsson and Infineon <IFXGn.DE> would pressure margins.
The world’s biggest maker of cellphone chips forecast on Wednesday current-quarter revenue of $2.5 billion to $2.7 billion, down from $2.74 billion in the year-ago period. Analysts on average had been expecting $2.66 billion.
“They’re feeling the recovery in emerging markets, but they’re not feeling it strong enough in developed markets,” said Broadpoint AmTech analyst Mark McKechnie.
For its second fiscal quarter ended March 28, Qualcomm said its profit was $774 million, or 46 cents per share, compared with a loss of $289 million, or 18 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter when it paid a hefty legal settlement to Broadcom Corp.
The company also said it earned 59 cents per share, excluding items, compared with Wall Street expectations of 56.5 cents per share.
Seagate beats Street view, shares jump
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Seagate Technology <STX.O> plans to add manufacturing capacity to handle increasing demand in the second half of the year and 2011, hoping to ride a recovery in corporate information technology spending.
Seagate, which on Tuesday reported a better-than-expected third-quarter profit after it shipped a record 50.3 million disk drives, said market demand is the highest it has ever been as consumers and companies continue to snap up disk drives to store movies, music and photos.
“We’re bringing on capacity,” Chief Financial Officer Patrick O’Malley told Reuters.
He expects total market demand to grow 10 percent to 12 percent to 200 million units in the December quarter of 2011 from roughly 180 million units at the end of the 2010 December quarter.
After aggressive cost-cutting during the recession, the company posted a gross margin of 29.6 percent in its fiscal third quarter. Analysts had been expecting around 26.5 percent.
Chief Executive Stephen Luczo said he expects the company to operate above its stated target gross margin of 22 percent to 26 percent in 2010.
Seagate’s shares shot up 3.5 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday after having gained 5.2 percent since Intel Corp’s <INTC.O> stellar results last week. The company is more reliant on corporate IT spending than its more consumer-oriented foe, Western Digital <WDC.N>.
Of cloaks, daggers and iPhones
Death, taxes and a new iPhone every summer — these are things the tech world can be certain of.
For the past three years, we have been forced to wait impatiently for Steve Jobs to pull the latest redesign of the company’s smartphone from his jeans pocket.
In 2007, we met the original iPhone. In 2008, Steve Jobs pulled out a new design, called the 3G, with GPS and a faster internet connection. In 2009, the 3GS had a faster brain, a compass and voice control.
Each time, the release was systematic and controlled.
This time, it’s been unveiled in a bunch of blurry images followed by a full photo shoot, some videos, and a wild story.
“It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it.”
The circumstances of its discovery gave way to rampant speculation around the Internet that Gizmodo, the Gawker-owned tech blog, paid the person who found it for access to the device. Then, there was confirmation that they paid. But they can’t make the device work. And there are inconsistent reports about where it was found, and so on and so on, and at this point, people are counting the hours until Apple intervenes. Or maybe the company placed it there on purpose. Perhaps time travelers from the future may have accidentally left it there. Or it’s a Japanese knockoff. No, Chinese!
UPDATED: Seagate switches call to avoid Apple steamroll
Technology companies know better than to release a new product on the same day as Apple, a master at the art of dominating the news cycle.
Apparently, the same rule holds true for quarterly earnings reports as well.
With just a day to go until it’s slated to hold an earnings conference call with analysts, hard drive maker Seagate Technology is scrambling to get out of Apple’s way.
Company representatives emailed and called some members of the press on Monday morning to alert them of last-minute schedule changes. With basically the entire tech world eagerly anticipating a briefing on the latest sales data of iPhones, Macs and iPads at 2pm on Tuesday, Seagate apparently concluded that its own plan to discuss shipments of 3.5-inch hard drives at 2pm might not draw a big audience, particularly as 11 of the 25 analysts that cover Seagate also cover Apple.
Instead, the hard drive maker will hold its call at 3pm PST on Tuesday.
Earnings season is always a hectic time, with a barrage of press releases, overlapping conference calls and stock price swings.
Google shares slide amid Schmidt speculation
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc shares fell more than 7 percent on Friday after its quarterly results came in short of expectations, leading some analysts to cut price targets on concerns about growth.
Some investors also disliked Google’s decision that Chief Executive Eric Schmidt would no longer participate in earnings conference calls, even though a number of prominent chief executives, including Apple Inc’s, IBM Corp’s and Microsoft Corp’s_, are often absent from such calls.
A number of brokerages raised their price targets on Friday for Google’s shares, citing favorable prospects for Google’s core search business. But Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth decreased his, citing a lack of growth momentum beyond search and advertising.
“A significant revenue driver beyond core search has not materialized and it’s becoming tougher for the company to beat numbers,” Anmuth wrote in a research note.
Reducing his forecast to $650 from $675, Anmuth added that sequential revenue growth and margins were lighter than expected. But he kept his “overweight” rating.
Other analysts were less downbeat. In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor said Google could continue to lean heavily on its core search business because it still holds potential for growth.
“The advertising model for TV, print and stuff like that is tanking,” he said. “I don’t think there is any limit to the growth in terms of online advertising because everything is going online.”
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