Look, the holiday season is expensive and everything, but if you or I lost $102 million in the back quarter of the year we’d be pretty upset. For AMD it’s a different conversation. The company’s financial performance hasn’t made for happy reading in recent times so it’s not particularly surprising to see them reporting the aforementioned net loss, or an operating loss of $49 million last quarter. In between the worrying numbers though are some indicators that AMD might be alright in the long run.
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The company’s Q4 revenue of $958 million is down 10% year-on-year. AMD explain their poor Q4 2015 performance as the result of “seasonally lower sales of semi-custom SoCs and down 23 percent year-over-year, primarily due to lower client processor sales.”
The report has already had an impact on AMD’s share price – significant losses will do that – and that’s reflected by a 6.15% decline in valueover the last 24 hours of trading.
However, looking beyond that immediate damage, things don’t look disastrous for AMD. For example, their computing and graphics segment accounted for almost half that revenue at $470 million, and that number’s up 11% year-on-year. It looks like the corporate reshuffle that created the Radeon Technologies Group has already had some impact.
Operating loss for Q4 was $99 million, a figure almost half that of their $181 million Q3 figure. “The sequential improvement was driven primarily by higher sales,” say AMD, “and the absence of a Q3 2015 inventory write-down and the year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by lower sales.”
Average selling prices to clients was also up last quarter, due to a wider range of notebook processors in the 2015 lineup and higher end GPUs reaching the market.
Looking forwards, AMD’s Polaris GPUs and Zen APU/CPU range will have a further positive impact on the computing and graphics segment. It’s going to take a while to see that impact reflected on future financial reports, but from a PC gamer’s perspective it’s beneficial to all to see a two-horse race continue between AMD and NVIDIA in the processor and graphics market.
CEO Dr Lisa Su released the following statement to accompany the report: “AMD closed 2015 with solid execution fuelled by the second straight quarter of double-digit percentage revenue growth in our Computing and Graphics segment and record annual semi-custom unit shipments.”