AMD all but stopped financial bleeding this quarter.

[humbug]

AMD's Q2 better than expected; sees Q3 profit ahead.

AMD's second quarter featured losses and a 18 percent decline in revenue, but came in better than estimates.
The company reported a second quarter loss of $74 million, or 10 cents a share, on revenue of $1.16 billion. The non-GAAP loss was 9 cents a share in the quarter.
Wall Street was looking for a loss of 12 cents a share on revenue of $1.11 billion.
In a statement, AMD CEO Rory Read said restructuring efforts have paid off and the company aims to deliver "significant revenue growth and a return to profitability in the third quarter."
The company's traditional CPU business showed improvement over the first quarter. Graphics chips were off from a year ago. The company ended the quarter with 9,928 employees, down from 11,737 a year ago.

Out of the big 3 tech companies AMD have been the worst hit by the financial crash and the decline in the PC market.

AMD have now been running at a loss for a year, posting huge losses this time last year, many doom Sayers at that time predicted AMD's imminent death.



As you can see at the 6 Month Q2 end 2012 they posted $2.998bn revenue with $503m losses.
By comparison they only posted $2.249bn revenue this 6 Month Q2 end, but with only a $127m loss

To tackle the declining PC market and the bleeding of funds they set out to restructure their hugley over bloated overheads and work on entering growing markets.

A year on there is a 15% reduction in staff and a series of new products, as well as much improved existing products.

For the growing mobile market they improved the power efficiency and performance of their existing BobCat low power APU's, with great success.
Its earned them design wins for some ultra thin Notbooks and Tablets from the likes of Samsung, Acer, HP, Fujitsu, Vizio and probably a few more.

They worked with Software developers like Adobe to improve performance on OpenCL for their applications and add features exclusive to the GCN architecture.
This has probably helped Apple to come around to AMD's work station GPU's, the new Mac-Pro has an AMD FirePro W9000 inside.

AMD have gone from sitting on their backsides and letting Nvidia work with game developers to optimize for their GPU to;- not only getting more involved, but almost completely taking over, from one extreme to the next.
They have also finally put real work into getting their prized 'Heterogeneous System Architecture' actually working instead of just talking about it.
There is no doubt in my mind those things are what largely helped AMD clinch the entire Game Console market, a very significant financial win.

AMD's server division (SeaMicro) is getting a lot of attention with the new SM15000 Opteron OpenStack Red-Hat certificated servers because they have a lot of cloud computing abilities.
AMD's partnership with ARM in building ARM based high density cloud servers is also getting some attention.

I think all in all push came to shove and AMD realized it was do or die, from our perspective as CPU enthusiasts it does not look like AMD have been doing much at all, but in order for AMD to save themselves we have taken the back seat, actually we are on the roof rack.....

Some of that ^^^ a small part of it, will be a part of the band-aid thats all but stopped the bleeding, most of it is not a part of the Q2 results as most of it is not going on sale until this quarter.
AMD say they will be back in profit in this the third quarter.
I believe them.

AMD are not going anywhere

 

[Zeed]

'AMD are not going anywhere' Ye with their CPUs they are not

WTB AMD cpu with IPC lever as my 5ghz sandy. I will pay them good money and go back to AMD.

ATM only GPUs are good from them for me.

 

[Jarrastafari]

I'm really impressed with their wins recently. I'm more excited for their projects than from most tech companies.

If I had money or knowledge, I'm sure I'd invest.

 

[wazza300]

good job they bought ati or amd would have said bye bye long ago

still nice to see them doing well

 

[bru]

It is very good to see them doing better than expected, I do hope they can continue to improve and finaly give us some new GPU's.

 

[Boomstick777]

If only they could execute better, by the time they get out Steamroller and HD 9XXX out, new products from competitors will be just around the corner..

AMD have great vision but lack execution..

They def are gaining momentum though, and are slowly turning things around. Hopefully next year without any console launches hogging resources AMD will be more on the ball with releasing their PC parts...

 

[Rroff]

AMD have now been running at a loss for a year, posting huge losses this time last year, many doom Sayers at that time predicted AMD's imminent death.

You didn't have to be a doom sayer to predict AMD's demise at the end of last year - that Q1 crunch has finished off many a company in similiar circumstances even those with the size and backing similiar to AMD. I don't think people realise quite what a testament to AMD it is that they not only survived it but came out relatively speaking in a fairly healthy shape - it certainly caught some of the big name financial analysts out - they didn't just call their potential demise on a whim.

 

[humbug]

You didn't have to be a doom sayer to predict AMD's demise at the end of last year - that Q1 crunch has finished off many a company in similiar circumstances even those with the size and backing similiar to AMD. I don't think people realise quite what a testament to AMD it is that they not only survived it but came out relatively speaking in a fairly healthy shape - it certainly caught some of the big name financial analysts out - they didn't just call their potential demise on a whim.

On the one hand, on the face of it at the time AMD's situation looked pretty desperate, i mean they lost half a Billion in 6 months.

But to me a lot of those people (not all) doom saying or seemingly panicking should have known better, i'm not an expert but knew enough to know AMD was not just going to drop dead any time soon, if at all.

AMD had and still have a cash stash to the tune of Billions of $ from better times, and the same again in assets.

what i will grant some of those people is the fact that AMD's debts outweighed their cash at the time.

But a closer look at AMD's finances and it was pretty clear they are actually well in profit every single quarter, the losses stemmed from paying down those debts, of which they are now 'largely paid down' there is a way to go yet but its no longer a problem. a very wise move from AMD even if its made their balance sheet look really bad.
Moving forward those debts are no longer a strain on their bottom line.

The problem with some people and even rating agencies is they don't really understand this stuff or know anything deeper than face value.

Listen to this, less that 48 hours ago Zacks (one of the big respected rating agencies) upgraded AMD's value to Rank #1 'strong buy' (as good as it gets) they are impressed with how AMD are doing and have given there their blessing.

Today Morgan Stanly (another big ratings agency) have down graded them to what is basically junk.

Thats two big hitters with analysis of AMD that are at extreme opposite ends.

One of those two could not be more wrong, and they are supposed to be the experts, the same experts who predicted death by this point.

For me, the best thing to do is to completely ignore those who proclaim to be experts, do your own research and you will soon know who is right and who is bonkers.

 

[d_brennen]

AMD can't close down for the forseeable future, Intel wouldn't allow it. Can you imagine how difficult it would to do business for Intel without AMD?

Bobcat was an interesting product; far better than the competition at the time, far cheaper too. However, AMD were unable to flood the market. Llano was a great APU, especially for low cost laptops. It featured in a few dozen machines, often over priced and/underspecced, funny that, eh? Same with Trinity and Richland is hardly setting the world on fire. Bulldozer wasn't great, Piledriver was what BD should have been, and mostly compares well with Intel competition in both price and performance aside from some loaded benchmarks, archaic code and raw single threaded performance which is year on year becoming less crucial.

AMDs problem has never been the product, it's the partners and in more recent times the fabs IMO

 

[Rroff]

On the one hand, on the face of it at the time AMD's situation looked pretty desperate, i mean they lost half a Billion in 6 months.

But to me a lot of those people (not all) doom saying or seemingly panicking should have known better, i'm not an expert but knew enough to know AMD was not just going to drop dead any time soon, if at all.

AMD had and still have a cash stash to the tune of Billions of $ from better times, and the same again in assets.

I'm no expert but my job requires atleast enough knowledge of retail operations that I (probably) know a little more about it than average and you (in general) do have to see beyond just the cash factor (and thats further complicated if you look into the details of AMD's accounts payable etc.).

The mentality (I'm talking in general rather than you specifically as I don't have much idea as to the extent of your knowledge on the matter) that on the face of it AMD has too much money and/or "people" just won't let a company as big as AMD fall is flawed.

I keep re-writing this post as a lot of its re-treading old ground but the gist of it is that AMD hit a combination of factors that can put a killer short term squeeze on a company that can topple even an ostensibly healthy company - spanking all your cash reserve (and it would have taken most of it) to get through the short term at a time when 3rd party confidence is also at an all time low can just as likely doom a company as not having the cash in the first place.

AMD played it smart instead, for instance they leveraged assets instead of spending hard cash reserves.

I can also understand why there are 2 very different views of the company - the valuation is somewhat inflated by the fact they did a lot better than many experts thought possible which isn't a problem if they continue doing well - and their long term future doesn't look too bad but does mean their valuation can take a bigger than proportional hit if things don't do so well.

 

[humbug]

@ Rroff, i never said AMD had to much money to fail, i certainly never said no one would let them, on that i think your confusing me with someone else.

I did say they have enough money for a very good chance to see them through these problems for long enough to get back on their feet.

An analysts is certainly open to opinion, your right about that, it also depends on knowledge and experience, again your right. but there is also a level of instinctive insight that cannot be tough or learnt, you can either read between the numbers and headlines, or you can't. And explaining it is impossible.
I don't know what else to tell you.

AMD can't close down for the forseeable future, Intel wouldn't allow it. Can you imagine how difficult it would to do business for Intel without AMD?

Bobcat was an interesting product; far better than the competition at the time, far cheaper too. However, AMD were unable to flood the market. Llano was a great APU, especially for low cost laptops. It featured in a few dozen machines, often over priced and/underspecced, funny that, eh? Same with Trinity and Richland is hardly setting the world on fire. Bulldozer wasn't great, Piledriver was what BD should have been, and mostly compares well with Intel competition in both price and performance aside from some loaded benchmarks, archaic code and raw single threaded performance which is year on year becoming less crucial.

AMDs problem has never been the product, it's the partners and in more recent times the fabs IMO

Yes, but there are some very nice Samsung Ultra Thin Notbooks with SSD's for Sub $700, to give you one example, Samsung say are using the Temash APU because they like the iGPU, that matters as its a product good enougth for third parties to actually want it for genuine reasons, AMD don't need to beg people to use their hardware, with that AMD can influence the price of the end product, as Intel are able to do.

Thats the key thats been missing from AMD for to long, its a mixture of not effectively communicating the benefits of their products were they are good, while others just plainly aren't.

This is why it was so important that AMD make Mobile chips that are comparable with what Intel and ARM have, the Jaguar core is exactly that.

Same with the workstation GPU's, they have more raw power than Nvidia's workstation GPU's, the problem was OpenCL was not used much at all in applications that those would use such a GPU for, its mostly, or has been CUDA, AMD needed to change that. which is exactly what they did and then told people about it, again now people like Apple actually want their workstation GPU's.

So far so good, but they need to keep this up, no relenting. being a success is hard work.