AMD has announced its Q1 2015 results. The chipmaker said that from revenue of $1.03 billion it made an operating loss of $137 million and a net loss of $180 million, during the first three months of the year. Despite the losses and undershooting Wall Street Analyst expectations AMD's CEO remains positive about company prospects for the longer term.
The headline revenue figure of $1.03 billion was down 17 per cent on the previous quarter and down 26 per cent on the figure from a year before. However losses were not as steep as in the previous quarter thanks to better margins and inventory adjustments. As mentioned in the intro, analysts had expected better – a loss of 5 cents per share, however AMD reported a loss of 9 cents per share. As a result of the shaky financials AMD shares are currently a huge 11 per cent down in afterhours trading.
In the official financial statement AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su wrote about the "challenging PC environment," and how the firm is focussed upon improving things pretty shortly. The second half of 2015 would be visibly stronger "based on completing our work to rebalance channel inventories and shipping strong new products," she said. In the longer term "Building great products, driving deeper customer relationships and simplifying our business remain the right long-term steps to strengthen AMD and improve our financial performance," said Su. In an interview with VentureBeat Su added an optimistic note about Windows 10, "We are all hopeful that the Windows 10 launch will be a strong catalyst for the market."
In regard to simplifying AMD's portfolio of products to concentrate on its strengths AMD revealed that it will immediately exit its dense server systems business, formerly SeaMicro.
AMD was keen to point out the following highlights of the quarter; the paper launch of Carrizo, the release of the HSA 1.0 specification, APU adoption in embedded poroduicts fgrom the likes of Samsung and Fujitsu, design wins for AMD FirePro graphics cards and server GPUs, support for AMD FreeSync by vendors including Acer, BenQ and LG Electronics, the LiquidVR initiative and 64-bit ARM-based server processor development.
Other interesting developments we have unearthed before official announcements have been made but which may well play an important part in AMD's future are the AMD Radeon 300 series graphics cards and the AMD Zen APU.
Intel Q1 2015 results
In case you missed it, Intel published its Q1 2015 results on Tuesday. The results were in line with what was expected by the largest PC chipmaker. Intel reported first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion, an operating income of $2.6 billion and net income of $2.0 billion.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich summed up "Year-over-year revenues were flat, with double-digit revenue growth in the data centre, IoT and memory businesses offsetting lower than expected demand for business desktop PCs". Looking ahead for full year 2015 Intel expects revenue to continue to be flat.
Key business unit trends for the first quarter of 2015 were as follows:
- Client Computing Group revenue of $7.4 billion, down 16 percent sequentially and down 8 percent year-over-year.
- Data Centre Group revenue of $3.7 billion, down 10 percent sequentially and up 19 percent year-over-year.
- Internet of Things Group revenue of $533 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
- Software and services operating segments revenue of $534 million, down 4 percent sequentially and down 3 percent year-over-year.
