AMD closed last night at a 52 week high of $9.91 and a few things are to blame for such a development. The most important fact that busted AMD shares is that AMD got $1.25 billion alimentation from Intel and that it can pay a big part of its 5+ billion debt to many banks.
Since AMD usually loses money each quarter, it doesn’t have
a good dynamic of returning its debt and this 1.25 billion surely boosted
things. We estimate that Intel probably made in excess of 20 billion on its worldwide "Market development fund" MDF program, so paying $1.25 billion was like a
joke to them.
The second thing that really boosted AMD was Intel’s
capitulation with its Larrabee project that were cancelled in current
development and got pushed at least until late 2010. Nvidia’s delay of Fermi also helped AMD as it ships some
limited numbers of DirectX 11 chips for a whole quarter.
Now for the bad part. AMD’s roadmap for 2010 is anything but
impressive and Intel has a chance to dominate in each and every market segment,
especially in notebook and netbook segment.
AMD promises that things will get great in 2011 with Bulldozer
and the real Fusion, but this is at least a year away from now and there is a
big chance that with such low current average selling prices AMD has little
chances to make things better in 2010.
AMD shares were at $2.10 at last Xmas and in a year time it
got up almost 500 percent. In fact, we haven't seen AMD trade at these levels in over two years. Let’s see can AMD go much higher than $9.91 and
continue its winning course.