After posting a quarterly loss of $1.19 billion, AMD switched chief executives Thursday, pushing CEO Hector Ruiz into the boardroom and replacing him with second-in-command Dirk Meyer.
The company cast the move as the product of a two-year succession plan. Its shares closed up 4.74 percent at $5.30, but were was down 7 percent in after hours trading. Its shares are down from $16.19 a share a year ago.
AMD noted in a press release that Meyer, 46, a 12-year-veteran of the company, is associated with the development of the company’s highly successful series of Athlon chips.
Those microprocessors gave the industry leader, Intel, a run for its money. But lately AMD has been stumbling, with technical glitches delaying the introduction of a new quad-core chip as it bleeds money from an acquisition gone wrong and stiff competition in the server chip arena.
Its problems continued Thursday, as the company also reported earnings. The second-quarter net loss expanded to $1.19 billion, or $1.96 a share, from $600 million, or $1.09, a year earlier, the Sunnyvale-based company said. Sales climbed 3.1 percent to $1.35 billion, missing analysts’ estimates.
AMD has reported seven consecutive net losses.
Ruiz, who came to AMD in 2000 from Motorola, took the blame for AMD’s troubles. When the Opteron was delayed last year, Ruiz told financial analysts that “we blew it” and promised it wouldn’t happen again. The Opteron platform is now shipping in “all major areas,” the firm said Thursday.
AMD paid $5.6 billion to acquire ATI Technologies, a graphics chip maker, in 2006. AMD says the acquisition is now worth half that amount.
The 62-year-old Ruiz has been named executive chairman of AMD. He is already chairman of the company, and will retain that post, the company said.
Taking over as chief executive will be Meyer, moving up from his current posts of president and chief operating officer.
From 2001 to 2006, Meyer led the company’s microprocessor business.
Ruiz came to AMD in 2000, first taking the job of president and chief operating officer and later becoming chief executive and chairman.
Before joining AMD, Ruiz was president of Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. He was born on Christmas Day, 1945, in Piedras Negras, Mexico. Naturalized in 1977, Ruiz is recognized as one of the leading Hispanics in high technology.
Meyer has been with the chip company for 12 years. He started as an engineer and made a mark with AMD’s first Athlon processor, the first such processor to achieve a speed of 1GHz. He was appointed president and COO in 2006 and elected to AMD’s board of directors last year.
“I am placing the company in excellent hands,” Ruiz said.
Bloomberg News contributed to this story. Contact Pete Carey at (408) 920-5419 or pcarey@mercurynews.com.
