AMD Reports Q4 2015 Results And FY 2015 Earnings
by Brett Howse on January 19, 2016 5:10 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- GPUs
- Financial Results
Today AMD released their quarterly earnings for Q4 of Fiscal Year 2015. AMD continues to struggle financially, and for Q4 they had revenues of $958 million, down 10% from last quarter and down 23% since a year ago. Gross margin for the quarter did increase to 30% after last quarter’s $65 million inventory write-down, and for the full year gross margin was 27%, impacted heavily by the write-down last quarter. For Q4, AMD had an operating loss of $49 million, and a net loss of $102 million, or $0.13 per share. For the full year, the operating loss was $481 million and the net loss was $660 million, or $0.84 per share.
| AMD Q3 2015 Financial Results (GAAP) | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | |||
| Revenue | $958M | $1.06B | $1.24B | ||
| Gross Margin | 30% | 23% | 29% | ||
| Operating Income | -$49M | -$158M | -$330M | ||
| Net Income | -$102M | -$197M | -$364M | ||
| Earnings Per Share | -$0.13 | -$0.25 | -$0.47 | ||
On a non-GAAP basis, AMD reports an operating loss for the quarter of $39 million, and a net loss of $79 million. For the full year 2015, the operating loss of $253 million, down from a non-GAAP operating income of $316 million in 2014. This amounts to a per share loss of $0.53 using non-GAAP numbers.
| AMD Q4 2015 Financial Results (Non-GAAP) | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | |||
| Revenue | $958M | $1.06B | $1.24B | ||
| Gross Margin | 30% | 23% | 34% | ||
| Operating Income | -$39M | -$97M | $52M | ||
| Net Income | -$79M | -$136M | $18M | ||
| Earnings Per Share | -$0.10 | -$0.17 | $0.02 | ||
Looking at the individual segments, the Computing and Graphics segment had revenue of $470 million for the quarter, up 11% since last quarter but down 29% year-over-year. AMD had more notebook processor sales compared to last quarter, but lower client processor sales compared to last year. This segment had an operating loss of $99 million, compared to $181 million last quarter and $56 million last year. The inventory write-down last quarter was the main reason for the improvement this quarter, and lower sales caused the year-over-year drop. One good nugget for AMD is that average selling price (ASP) increase sequentially for processors, although it is down year-over-year, but GPU ASP increased both sequentially and year-over-year.
| AMD Q4 2015 Computing and Graphics | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | |||
| Revenue | $470M | $424M | $662M | ||
| Operating Income | -$99M | -$181M | -$56M | ||
The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment had revenue of $488 million, down 23% from last quarter and 15% year-over-year. Operating income was $59 million, down from $84 million last quarter and $109 million last year. AMD attributes the seasonally lower sales of semi-custom SoCs as the reason for the drop from last quarter, and the year-over-year drop is due to lower game console royalties, and lower server and embedded sales.
| AMD Q4 2015 Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom | |||||
| Q4'2015 | Q3'2015 | Q4'2014 | |||
| Revenue | $488M | $637M | $577M | ||
| Operating Income | $59M | $84M | $109M | ||
The All Other segment had an operating loss of $9 million, an improvement over the $61 million loss last quarter, and a big improvement over the $383 million operating loss in Q4 2014. AMD has made some restructuring charges which affected them last quarter, and the year-over-year improvement was “primarily due to the absence of a goodwill impairment charge, lower restructuring and other special charges, net and a Q4 2014 lower of cost or market inventory adjustment.”
With a less than amazing 2015, for 2016 AMD is resting a lot of hope on their new 4th generation GCN GPU, which they are calling Polaris. On the CPU side, they hope to execute their new Zen platform with a 40% increase in Instructions Per Clock. With AMD getting out of the fab business, they have now been relying on others to move forward on the process side, and we are finally seeing fabs other than Intel now producing FinFET based designs. Clearly AMD has a lot of work to do to not only launch the products, but execute sales of them as well. VR could also be an area where AMD could find some growth, since the requirements for VR will likely drive some GPU sales over the next 12 months.
Source: AMD Investor Relations
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szimm - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
You have to remember, that the Steam hardware survey does not represent a random group of samples from the overall market, but rather those who are biased toward gaming (by virtue of having Steam installed). Also, IIRC, participation in the Steam survey is voluntary - this further narrows the group by essentially filtering out those who do not care so much about the PC hardware market, to want to be part of the statistics and let Valve scan their PCs.So the only conclusion you can really draw from that, is that among people who are gamers and knowledgeable about tech, AMD has a slightly higher approval rating than in the overall market. This would fit well with AMDs lack of effective marketing, and with the (mostly untrue) perception that their cards and drivers are more finicky and difficult to live with for less tech-savvy people.
On a side note, I assume that the 19%-81% ratio mentioned above simply ignores all the Intel GPU equipped PCs out there, while the Steam survey of course doesn't. This means, that if we convert the numbers in a similar way, the ratio between AMD and nVidia users among the Steam userbase is actually closer to 35%-65%.
beck2050 - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
Sales in the last quarter of DISCRETE gpus were 81 to 19. Steam is not a sales report.wumpus - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
"You have to remember, that the Steam hardware survey does not represent a random group of samples from the overall market, but rather those who are biased toward gaming (by virtue of having Steam installed)."If you aren't gaming and can't be bothered to install Steam, then built-in graphics are good-enough. (High end CAD machines are a *tiny* minority). If you are looking at real revenue (at least for the Radeon division), I'd look to Steam results.
The worst part, and it counts for Nvidia was well, is that there is little reason to upgrade your .28nm parts. You might get more transistors, you might get a little better design, you might pull less watts (with a Nvidia system), but you don't get the big gains you expected on old generation changes. .18nm might go faster and cooler, but don't expect cheaper: Moore's law is more like a guideline now.
rtho782 - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Market share of installed GPUs is different to Market share of Sales this quarter.If historically it's always been 50/50, and 10% of people buy a new GPU each year, even if you have 100% of new sales, it will take a long time for the installed base to be 100% yours.
eanazag - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
This is a subset of all computers out there. Not every computer has Steam installed. Plus there are quite a few Nvidia mobile GPUs represented in that list and they for sure have a dominant position in laptops. Though the numbers are interesting, but looking at the details it is much more muddy than any of the arguments presented. There are a lot of crap cards in the numbers as opposed to simply talking about what's selling from both Red and Green's big guns $200+.TheJian - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
81% of the DISCRETE market is what he meant. NV doesn't make apus for PC which steam counts for both Intel and AMD. Thought that may change soon with ARM PC's (fully loaded like and Intel/amd PC, big drives, discrete gpu, 16-32GB mem, 500-1000psu etc etc) at some point I hope.Unless AMD made their ZEN cpu the size of Intel's current CPU+GPU sides, there isn't much point in hyping it up. It needs to be big enough so Intel's only response is to make a brand new design that is PURE CPU. for desktops. If they went anything under 50% bigger than Intel's cpu side they'll fail and be priced down while Intel simply plops down 2 quads and sells for the same price (probably at first just turning off gpu's to get watts in the 100-125w range). My devils canyon hits 68w or so with gpu off, so if AMD makes a huge chip (gpus on top skylake chips are larger than the cpu side now), they can theoretically smoke Intel, and anything intel can slap together for a few years like ~2000. The difference being, they can now produce FAR more than a meager 20% they were stuck at before. This time you have GF/Samsung/TSMC that can all put out your chips if desired. If they went huge they could possibly build 50% of the market or more, if they went anything less than 125% I think they won't make much because Intel will just plop a cherry picked core out, and drop prices on all others $50-100 to make sure AMD collects nothing while they come up with a REAL answer. But you can't price down something that is beating your top end by 25-75% across the board in games. That takes a new design. We've seen the 8 core vs. 4 core (see AMD and how that worked out, loses everything but corner cases and runs hot, massive watts etc), and Intel would end up in that boat for a while. But again, ONLY if AMD went HUGE for a TRUE KING, like dirk said they needed when he left in 2011. Get a king or you have ZERO pricing power. If they beat Intel 20% or more in everything I'd gladly pay $50 on top of Intel's top chip at the time on desktop (say $400, where skylake running $350). But if they tie, and die is not larger, I'll go Intel again. Management has had 5 years to follow what Dirk said. Being 2nd and "OK, but cheaper" just loses money, and never has pricing power to MAKE wads of cash. It never gains market share either. Perform so you can CHARGE accordingly or go bankrupt in this business.
I hope they went big. We still don't know, only have IPC info, but not how big it is, speeds, cache, watts etc. That one stat doesn't say much and could even be shooting low on many things. You definitely don't want another bullsnozer...LOL. 300mm^2 sounds good :) But my guess is management is still dumb and went with about the same as Intel's cpu side, so they can keep putting gpus with it reasonably. I was really hoping two tech designs (because going my way for cpu, HUGE, would make a APU kind of out). Maybe a high clocked dual with 4 threads would be ok. It, can't be much worse than a current quad apu from AMD if it's higher clocked and 40% IPC improvement anyway). Go big or go home AMD. 2nd place just=30% margins v.s NV/Intel 56-64% margins. Learn/adapt or die.
Ammaross - Friday, January 22, 2016 - link
Wow....if AMD followed this FUD, they'd run aground for sure.Yes, they should make a beast of a CPU with high IPC to beat the i7-6xxxK CPUs so they're talk about them. But, an extra 25-75% in GAMES??? WTH do you think CPUs do? Render polygons? Yes, the weak IPC of AMD chips makes them shortfall Intel by a few FPS by default, but your CPU won't double your FPS. Sorry.
The market is driving toward ultra-lowpower CPUs, not behemoth power monsters. While there is a significant margin to be had by that top 1% of CPU purchases, it's the mainstream stuff that gives you revenue. AMD's current problem is that even with a lower cost than Intel, they still suffer an significant IPC loss which they have to make up by OCing the chip and STILL have less FPS for the same gfx card. This costs wattage, making the system overall less efficient (power-wise, noise-wise, size-wise). Being able to use the new process node similar to Intel's, they'll once again have the opportunity to compete in performance per watt. A flagship that can trounce Intel by simply throwing raw cores at a problem may help, but they need to win in single-thread as well.
xdrol - Monday, January 25, 2016 - link
Steam survey is about current owners, not new owners (aka sales) of different chips..Bateluer - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Because Nvidia has a marketing team, AMD really doesn't. On the GPU side, AMD offers a better , or at least a comparable,card at every price point. But people still buy Nvidia because they get the marketing slammed in their face.eanazag - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
The numbers you are referring to are for one quarter (3 months). That typically is slanted based on product releases. Earlier in the same page it indicated Intel at 71%, Nvidia at 15%, and AMD at 11% in GPU percentages. I think these numbers are more representative. than you 80% Nvidia number. Nvidia having 4 points of market share more sounds true.