AMD gains while Intel slips in Q2 MPU market share

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 9/11/2007

Although the company's performance on Wall Street continues to disappoint, analysts say that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has gained strength in recent months in terms of microprocessor market share.

According to market research firm iSuppli Corp.'s final estimate of Q2 microprocessor market share, AMD gained 2.5 percentage points in the quarter compared to Q1, to take a 13.4 percent share of overall microprocessor revenue.

Meanwhile, industry leader Intel Corp. lost 2 percentage points in share during Q2, ending up with a still-impressive 78.8 percent stake of the overall market.

The final numbers for Q2 show a far greater boost for AMD, and a far greater drop for Intel, than the preliminary estimates released by iSuppli in July.  At that time, the firm had said that during Q2 there had been a 0.5 percentage-point decrease for Intel's market share and a 0.5 percent increase for AMD. AMD's Q2 advance brought to an end a period of decline for the company that saw its market share shrink by almost 6 points from 16.8 percent in Q3 2006 to 10.9 percent in Q1 2007.

"AMD's performance in the second quarter of 2007 was both impressive and much needed, as the company managed to halt the three-quarter market share advance of archrival Intel," Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research at iSuppli, said in a statement.

The overall microprocessor market consists of RISC and general-purpose devices, as well as the X86-type chips for PCs sold by AMD and rival Intel Corp. With the debut on Monday of AMD's quad-core x86 offering, Barcelona, the market share battle between the two companies is primed to heat up even more in the coming months.

Nevertheless, AMD's stock price has thus far failed to seriously reflect any gains the company has made recently.  This morning, despite AMD's much-hyped quad-core launch on Monday, the company's share price opened at $13.08, up just 1 percent from Monday's closing price of $12.94 and up an only slightly more encouraging 3.7 percent from Friday's closing price. Although today's opening price is 16 percent up from the 52-week low of $11.27 the company's stock was trading at just last month, it is nevertheless a major decline from the company's high-flying Wall Street performances during the spring of 2006, when AMD's stock hit $42.70. As of 12:35 p.m. eastern today, the company's stock was trading at $12.98 a share.