AMD hit by $180 million loss in Q1 2015

April 20, 2015 | 12:23

Tags: #financial #lisa-su #q1-2015 #rory-read #windows-10

Companies: #amd #seamicro

AMD has reported its financial results for the first quarter of its 2015 financial year, and they're not showing the growth for which investors had hoped - although the company has, at least, offered a timescale for partner Microsoft's Windows 10 launch.

In its announcement late last week, AMD claimed revenue of $1.03 billion for the quarter - a 17 per cent quarter-on-quarter decline, to be expected exiting the lucrative Christmas sales period, and a more worrying 26 per cent year-on-year drop. While profit margin rallied somewhat to 32 per cent compared with 29 per cent in the previous quarter, there was no escaping the final conclusion: an overall $180 million loss, a massive increase on the $20 million loss it suffered in the same quarter last year.

Speaking during a conference call with analysts, investors and press, AMD chief executive Lisa Su outlined a path back to profitability to the company - starting with abandoning SeaMicro, the microserver specialist it acquired back in 2012. At the time, AMD claimed that it would accelerate its transformation 'into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data centre leadership position,' but then-chief executive Rory Read's predictions of success never really came true. As a result, the $334 million deal - $281 million in cash, the rest in stock - is being all-but written-off, as Su leads the company away from SeaMicro's target market with an immediate exit of the dense server systems business.

'Under the backdrop of a challenging PC environment, we are focused on improving our near-term financial results and delivering a stronger second half of the year based on completing our work to rebalance channel inventories and shipping strong new products,' Su claimed.

During the call, Su stated that the company was expecting an up-tick from the launch of Windows 10 and its related DirectX 12 application programming interface (API) later this year. At the same time, she did something Microsoft has thus far refused: put a deadline on the launch, claiming that the operating system and API bundle would launch 'late July' - fitting in with Microsoft's woolly commitment to a summer 2015 launch.

Blaming a 'weaker than expected market environment' for the poor performance of AMD's graphics segment, Su claimed that her company hoped to regain market share from rival Nvidia - which currently holds a majority of the enthusiast discrete GPU market - in the second half of the year, hinting that the company's rumoured AMD Radeon R9 300-series graphics cards will be arriving in time for the Windows 10 launch.

The full figures can be found on AMD's investor relations website.
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