Boycott Islam: UAE company makes move on AMD

Intel’s strongest computer chip rival, AMD, has now had over 8% of its stock purchased by a company out of the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. I take especial displeasure and interest in this incident because I personally own AMD stock. While I am not yet quite ready to put AMD onto the Boycott Islam list, I am definitely close to doing so. I will be making my anger known to AMD this coming week in a couple of personal emails and if I sense that even more of AMD will be going to Muslim interests, I will be selling my stock and submitting AMD to the list.

The UAE is for all intents and purposes little more than a smaller, richer Saudi Arabia, being predominantly Sunni Muslim. The fingers of the sheiks are reaching out more and more into our lives. They sense the diminishing of oil power and so they seek to replace that with other means. I mean to put a stop to them. You can help.

From Bloomberg News, The Associated Press:

Gulf investor buys stake in chip maker AMD

In the latest foreign commitment by a government-backed investor, Abu Dhabi’s investment arm is spending $622 million for an 8.1 percent stake in Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s largest maker of computer processors after Intel.

The Abu Dhabi company, Mubadala Development, paid $12.70 a share for the 49 million new shares, Advanced Micro said Friday.

Advanced Micro filed documents with regulators Thursday in the United States to sell as much as $700 million in new stock. The company, which is based in Sunnyvale, said Mubadala would not receive any board representation as part of the noncontrolling, minority investment.

Therefore, the transaction will not be subject to review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is meant to identify national security risks.

Funds like Mubadala are purchasing up stocks around the globe as governments in the Middle East invest the revenue from surging oil prices.

These sovereign wealth funds, through which governments buy equities and other assets, will grow to $7.9 trillion by 2011 from $1.9 trillion now, Merrill Lynch economists wrote in a report last month.

Last year, the proposed sale of some American ports to a Dubai company set off an outcry in Congress that abated only after alternative buyers were found.

Mubadala agreed in September to buy a 7.5 percent stake in Carlyle Group, the U.S. private-equity firm with $76 billion in assets, for $1.35 billion.

The Dubai fund’s investments also include stakes in Ferrari, the Italian carmaker, and SR Technics, an Swiss aircraft maintenance company.

Advanced Micro posted more than $2 billion in net losses in the past four quarters, and analysts estimate it will not return to profit until 2009 as it struggles to keep pace with Intel.

Spending on a new plant, a $5.4 billion acquisition and price competition with Intel, the semiconductor industry’s richest company, have hurt Advanced Micro’s finances.

Advanced Micro had a 23.5 percent market share in the third quarter, similar to a year earlier. Intel has the rest.

Advanced Micro said it would use the proceeds of the sale for general corporate purposes including investing in research and development, product innovations and manufacturing.