- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine - Sir William Osler
AMD earnings bad but not as bad as expected
THINGS ARE BAD, but could be worse for AMD as the little big chip firm reported yet another quarterly loss, but beat pessimistic analyst predictions last night.
With a Q1 loss of $416 million - $0.66 per share - and things not looking much chipper for Q2, AMD hardly had reason to crack open the bubbly, but the firm's CFO, Robert Rivet, said his firm would become cash flow positive again in the second quarter when restructuring started to take effect. We seem to have heard that before.
AMD's first quarter was more-or-less flat compared to last year's fourth quarter but down 21 per cent from Q1 '08, with the firm reporting $1.177 billion in revenues.
Operating losses for the quarter totaled $308 million and gross margins were 43 per cent. Excluding GlobalFoundries, however, gross margins came to just 34 per cent.
"The outlook is murky at best," said a depressed AMD CEO, Dirk Meyer, confessing, "Server was the weak spot." Growth in notebooks and desktops had saved the firm from more dire results.
Indeed, revenue from computing kit totaled $938 million while graphics systems pulled in $222 million.
Meyer did have a stab at optimism declaring, "we continued to beat or exceed our roadmaps for the quarter".
AMD's CFO was more upbeat, noting AMD was entering 2009, "a very different company than the one you were following as recently as a year ago-a much nimbler company."
In fact there's barely anyone left at all, he nearly said.
Despite predicting the firm would be cash positive again by the second half of the year, Rivet was careful not to be overly optimistic about the firm's second quarter predictions.
"We believe there's still some supply chain things to work through. We're just being cautious at this point, and saying potentially we'll be down," he said. µ
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Is there much life left for amd? I hope so!
AMD Is Coming Into Final Strecht With Fine Shape. AMD Improved Intel Product by default & now Intel Is Almost Leading computer Engineer. Excepting Intel Abandons Most of Its OWn Best work, Forcing Others To Complete Design Properly.
AMD Has Been LifeSaver for Almost Decade. AMD Should Think Family. AMD Should Hit Multi Core Market Like CAT, Running On ALL Fours. Maybe thats "True" Multi n' Ultee'.
Perhaps AMD Will Fade, NO Employees Is Good Indicator. Yet AMD Made Computing REAL, nOT Blow Head Promises of Intel, Whom Promised AT Least 20 Ghz/s by NOW.Seezors only, of course. AMD Is Complex in BackGround & Challenger. AMD Has Been #1. TS Drashek
I'm always amazed as how some websites are telling people that AMD shares slumped 5% without mentioning that in past 3 months they went up 75%. I agree with the article title that AMD situation is not bad at all. Because of the recession and constant price fight they posted some loses but on the other hand they have the strongest product portfolio in years.
I second that, since the debut of the Phenom 2 X4, it's Opteron derivatives and Low Power versions and the ATi HD 4000 series, AMD has the most complete Porfolio ever, only lacking of a competitive CPU against the Core i7 and even the Phenom 2 gets close in many scenarios. Thanks to them, the innovation hasn't stopped even with this recession.
AMD's CFO was more upbeat, noting AMD was entering 2009, "a very different company than the one you were following as recently as a year ago-a much nimbler company."
Any more nimbler will feel like a guy coming out of castration!
When your stock falls below $2/share, a 75% move is often just NOISE... Plenty of banks and other companies heading toward $1-3/share can move up 75% without much fanfare.
When you look at where AMD started any appreciable time out, a short term 'dead cat bounce' (to use a Wall St term) is really not surprising and anything to write home about. Just think of all the AMD cheerleaders talking about how big a steal AMD was at $8 and then again at $4.
The am3 cpus with their higher performance per buck ratio may save them, if intel does not release something better, and lower priced.
And who the hell is that sense-making fake drashek, he/she never made sense now all of the sudden he/she starts to make sense?
I was expecting a lot worse from AMD especially with the recession.
Yes it's unfortunate when people get laid off, but when a company starts losing money like AMD did there is no alternative.
How about blaming intel for the loss of those jobs? It was their anti-competetiveness that led to AMD's woes. Of course AMD didn't help themselves but if you have a company 10 times larger than you deliberately trying to make things difficult, they are going to succeed.
Anyway, AMD will get a few hundred million thrown their way, the job cuts will start to show on the wage bill and they will make a profit in Q4 this year. It will help when Nvidia die as well and ATI take their share of the discrete gpu market.