Quote:
Originally posted by Moridin
Not to get into a Jerry Sanders bashing fest, but AMD is not a well run company IMO. In it’s 30+ years of existence AMD has rarely made any real profit, and even when they have had competitive products Jerry’s ego gets in the way. He focuses more on his attempts to hurt Intel then returning value to his own shareholders.
A prime example of this is the embedded processor market. In the mid 90’s AMD had one of the best embedded processors around, yet they killed it to concentrate on competing with Intel in the desktop space. Now that Intel has one of the strongest processors in this market AMD is going out and spending hundreds of millions of dollars they do not have to buy startup to get back into this market.
AMD had a successful division selling chips for a wide variety of products which they sold in the late 90’s despite that fact that it was one of their few profitable areas at the time.
Even today when they are in just about the best position ever in terms of product quality they just can’t seem to make a profit. The sad part is that with their busness model, even in the very unlikely event they can supplant Intel as the dominant processor maker it will not do much for their shareholders because they wouldn’t make anywhere near as much money at it as Intel does.
My advice is that you invest in AMD with grate caution. Intel is a better investment, but I’m not big on the whole chip sector. As long as they have their monopoly put you money into Microsoft. If you want a company that is coming on strong and knows how to leverage that into a profit try IBM. In the last two years they have nearly tripled their market share in mid range servers, continue to own the high end (mainframe) space and are making more money then ever on both due to their concentration on selling services as well as hardware.
I very much agree with what you say, but I am only investing in them with my money dedicated to "very-risky investments". I also have stock in Oakley, who makes expensive sungalsses, and Plug and Power, a fuel cell company in this "risky" portfolio.