AMD totally shakes up channel strategy

VP JOHN BYRNE said that AMD and ATI sales and marketing teams in Europe are already merged while that will happen in the US too as part of a radical channel programme it will kick off worldwide on May the first.

Byrne said that worldwide it has 10 geographic regions and, as part of its global strategy, it will work with competitors Intel and Nvidia as partners to provide an open approach to the entire market.

It will simplify existing AMD and ATI channel programmes to offer cooperative marketing money and other benefits to partners who sell AMD CPUs, graphics chips and chipsets, or for any combination. He said that while AMD/ATI has a good grasp of what it sells, every quarter it would like its customers to provide data for the type of products they're selling by segment.

He said: "It's hard to estimate how big the channel market is for graphics card and quantify how big the upgrade possibilities are."

He said that this year it's all about winning market share but also making sure AMD wants to be profitable. AMD wants to encourage people to sell CPUs, graphics chips and moherboards but doesn't want to discourage partners who only sell CPU or graphics chips.

He said AMD will reduce the number of funded partners by half and give the remaining partners more money per quarter, and offer grahics funding to existing CPU partners in selected regions. There will be a reimbursement bonus for multiple AMD product brands in co-op activities. They'll be able to join any marketing programmes but AMD will ask them to supply it with purchase data, inventory data and sell out data, not including customer data.

Byrne provided some interesting data on the percentage of add-in boards sold at different prices. He said 30 per cent sold for less than $49, 23 per cent for less than $80, 26 per cent for less than $100, 11 per cent for less than $150, and only three per cent for boards over $200. Its AIB partners can make between six to 14 per cent, a distributor two to five per cent, and the retail price will be between two and 25 per cent.

We asked if AMD/ATI believed that, in a bill of materials for a PC, the Windows operating system component was too large compared to other slices of the BOM pie. He said that AMD didn't see that, but while it had hoped for large upgrade potential for people moving to Vista, that hadn't materialised yet. However, he said, when it does materialise it and its channel will be ready to deliver DX10 products across the range.

So far, 600,000 people had downloaded the ATI tool on how to upgrade their systems to Vista. µ