How does a company spin the fact that it lost a whopping $590 million in its last fiscal quarter as "solid results"? It"s actually pretty easy if you have AMD"s latest financial results. The PC CPU and GPU processor company said this week that the loss for the first quarter of 2012 was due in part to a one time accounting charge of $703 million.
That number was because of a previously announced restructuring of AMD"s business deal with the chip manufacturing company Globalfoundries. It also had a number of other one time charges, including $6 million related to AMD"s recent acquisition of the server maker SeaMicro. If all of these charges are factored out, AMD would have had a profitable quarter.
AMD also said it recorded revenues of $1.59 billion for the quarter that ended on March 31, which was higher than analysts" expectations. The company predicted growth of three percent in revenues for the current second quarter time period.
With the PC business starting to pick up again after a very slow 2011, combined with the launch of Windows 8 later in the year, AMD could see better times ahead as it continues to battle its main rival Intel.