AMD SA employees safe

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 18 Apr 2008

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has confirmed the local arm will not be affected by the company's global lay-offs.

Despite the company's international job cuts and disappointing revenue figures, AMD plans to expand the local operation.

Gautam Srivastava, VP for sales and marketing in the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan, says: "SA has been my focus since I was appointed to the region and in good time, we will be expanding the employee contingent."

He says this may not happen until the company has stabilised globally, but discussions around expanding into other parts of Africa are under way.

The chipmaker has struggled to maintain market share against competitor Intel since it acquired its graphics division, ATI. Last week the company announced it would cut around 10% of its global workforce, amounting to 1 680 jobs globally.

At the time, AMD could not confirm whether the South African office would remain open; however, Srivastava says the company is now in a good position to pursue local opportunities.

AMD has consolidated its channel partners and scaled up local relationships with vendors like Sun Microsystems, Acer and HP.

Barcelona

Srivastava says AMD is optimistic about its global operations. "We have had a few difficult quarters, and the late arrival of Barcelona meant our competition had a head start in the server market. However, we believe those days are now behind us."

The company admits to having had a hard time catching up with market share, and says the global lay-offs and restructuring is what any responsible company should do.

Barcelona debuted in September last year, but certain software created erroneous calculations in the hardware. According to Srivastava, the glitch was correctable with a software patch, but at the expense of performance. "The new release of Barcelona now has that error corrected at a hardware level."

The global analyst community touted Barcelona as the company's saving grace. It was re-launched last week and AMD is confident it will provide the company the revenue performance expected by analysts.

The company says the silicon chip market has worked in this manner for years, with revenue fluctuations and hardware challenges. "Our competitor [Intel] had a similar problem as we did with Barcelona in their Pentium processor."

AMD is focusing on providing full platforms that function in given verticals, such as multimedia, gaming, graphic development or home. "The company moving forward will be looking at providing end-to-end solutions using both AMD chipsets and ATI graphics as a springboard."