AMD Financial Analyst Day 2008

Introduction

Yesterday, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) conducted their Financial Analyst Day for the 2008 calendar year. This is an event in which the company publicly displays a realistic assessment of its technological prowess, a progress card of its current and projected financial states, and discusses some key decisions the company plans to make in the next fiscal year.

The company shed its company slogan of “Smarter Choice” and replaced it with “The future is fusion”, seeing it as a more fitting portrayal of what the company’s core processes are based on: to deliver solution oriented technologies, rather than product oriented, with a solution including several AMD products that work in collaboration to deliver the computing experience AMD intends to give its consumers. Dirk Meyer set in a simple new model on which the company should proceed with its plans: Profitability, Focus and Execution. This mandate for the company preaches that the company should be profitable in good times and bad, focus on areas where the company can succeed, and execute on every commitment timely. It served as a template for the big names in AMD management to share their plans on.



The event consisted of main sessions, where the cream of AMD management addressed the audience. These were followed by break-out sessions that went into the details of making large portions of data and information soluble for financial analysts and the press. During the course of the main sessions, AMD came up with some interesting announcements, named and detailed on several new product-plans and technologies the company plans to execute, with projections reaching all the way up to the year 2011. This article aims to cover some of those in detail. A break-up of the main session, consisting of addresses would be:

• Dirk Meyer, President and CEO
• Nigel Dessau, SVP and CMO (Computing)
• Randy Allen, SVP and CMO
• Rick Bergman, SVP and GM (Graphics Product Group)
• Doug Grose, incoming CEO of the Foundry Company
• Bob Rivet, EVP, COO and CAO, Acting CFO

Let us decipher some of the eventful parts of their addresses: