Some Wall Streeters are sounding early warning bells regarding a possible consumer PC slowdown. Yesterday, those rumors affected Intel and AMD share prices. On August 11, Microsoft also got dinged.

What’s Microsoft’s response? During a question-and-answer session at Oppenheimer’s Annual Technology, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Boston on August 10, General Manager of Investor Relations Bill Koefoed downplayed slowdown reports. From the transcript of his remarks:

“You know, whether or not the market’s up or down one month or another, I don’t know, there tends to be, since I’ve had this job, there tends to be a lot of chatter. There’s a lot of chatter back in kind of April, May about PC markets for the second quarter. I don’t know that I would take two guys that go visit some ODM (original design manufacturer) in Taiwan as a reference on what the market looks like. I would gather a lot of information and then decide what you think that it looks like.”

Koefoed reminded Oppenheimer conference attendees that Microsoft has sold 175 million Windows 7 licenses and repeated that business upgrades to Windows 7 are starting to happen now. He said demand in emerging markets is strong. Koefoed reiterated Microsoft’s earlier guidance that “our Windows division would roughly move in line with the PC market.”

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Microsoft execs downplay talk of possible PC demand slowdown | ZDNet

Posted By: JMH
12 Aug 2010