The Biggest Fortune Losers

Fortune 500′s posted their Biggest Losers of 2007. Some I was not surprised by and some I’m rather shocked about.

  1. General Motors (loss 38.73 billion USD)
  2. Sprint/Nextel (loss 29.58 billion USD
  3. Merrill Lynch (7.77 billion USD)
  4. Advanced Micro Devices (3.38 billion USD)

We knew GM was having problems. With losing as much as ExxonMobil made in profits during 2007, I’m staggered by the irony. With Sprint, we all knew it was just a bailout of Nextel and to provide a transition as people move to more standard wireless connectivity. Merrill Lynch was hit hard by the falling real estate so we all expected it. The one I was surprised about was AMD. The CEO, Hector Ruiz,  sees it like I do though. With the acquisition of ATI, AMD had to spend a little to prepare themselves for the future, calling 2007 a “transitional year”. This is going to mean excellent big things for them because of GPU and CPU integration, but the combination of the purchase and the slow release of Opteron and Phenom processors set them back shiny gem.