Posted on Tuesday, May 06 2008 @ 14:16 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A brief filed by AMD's lawyers in its antitrust lawsuit against Intel claims AMD needs at least twice as much marketshare to sustain its business. The firm says it had a marketshare of only 13% of the processor market in Q4 2007 and claims this is less than half of what it requires to operate as a sustainable business:
At the end of 2007, AMD had 13 percent of the processor market, "less than half of what it requires to operate long-term as a sustainable business," the brief said, explaining that Intel's alleged efforts to shut the company out of the processor business had largely succeeded.
"Measured on a revenue share basis, AMD made little progress growing its slice of the pie," it said.
The argument that Intel's alleged anti-competitive behavior has so hurt AMD that its future is in jeopardy is crucial to the company's claims for relief, including damages. But the claims could further spook corporate customers already wary of the company's financial troubles.
Companies generally make computer purchasing decisions with a long-term view and plan to use and purchase similar systems for many years to come. Fresh concerns about AMD's long-term sustainability coupled with existing worries about the company's fiscal health -- weakened by the delayed release of its Quad-Core Opteron processor and mounting long-term debt-- could lead CIOs to consider computers based on Intel's chips instead.
Source: PC World
