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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Jumangi - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
AMD keeps losing money but I guess its not that much each quarter so they can just drag on for another year hoping for the next CPU or GPU to save them. I think at some point they would have to sell out and get what they can but hey somehow RIM is still around these days.DnaAngel - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Everyone saw this coming honestly. AMD has stopped innovating years ago. They rely on market hype and recycle old products. They completely abandoned desktop CPU market in favor of just focusing on APU's for the mobile market, GPU's and Server CPU's. Since then Intel has made leaps and bounds in SoC R&D, allowing their mobile chips to not only outperform AMD APU's in both CPU power and integrated on-die GPU power as well. Nvidia is still updating GPU architecture (Pascal will be introduced this year) thus broadening the gap between the two. AMD's R300 series was supposed to be the next best thing, going toe to toe with Nvidias GTX 900 series and then some, but once the smoke cleared, they were just rebrands with almost 0 performance or innovation gains.AMD is in financial distress due to lack of innovation and no real desire or means to fully compete anymore. They are milking the contracts they have with MS and Sony for the APU’s put into the new consoles, but other than that they are in real trouble. Eventually Fed will step in and funnel them money (if they aren’t already) to just keep them afloat on paper, as not to create an Intel/Nvidia monopoly, which by default is already happening.
I would gladly buy AMD products as I have in the past, when they can go toe to toe with current offerings for a lesser price.
xthetenth - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
I wish Nvidia would stop innovating like AMD, they'd probably come up with something decent. The biggest innovation we've had from them is pulling out the FP64 and compute flexibility to free up power for gaming and selling FP16 capabilities. It's not AMD who's going to be putting its competitors memory onto its next generation chips designed for an API pioneered by its competitor, now is it?Incidentally, if anything it looks like Polaris, which had working samples at CES is going to beat Pascal, which had 980M modules used in its place, and that (surprise surprise) has an updated GPU architecture.
I have a feeling that last sentence is their biggest problem. If they're even they need to have a better price as well.
frenchy_2001 - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
HBM is an industry standard, same as HBM2. AMD was the first one to implement it with their partner, Hynix. Now, what did that give them?The truth is that both AMD and Nvidia were hurt, badly, by the stagnation of foundry process. Nvidia has been on 28nm since the GF680, in march 2012 (similar to AM with the 7970 in january 2012). Seeing no end to it, Nvidia sacrificed 64 bit capabilities for better gaming performance. AMD decided to skip a refresh outside of Fury.
This year will be the first new process introduced in GPU since 2012. It should give us great improvements (from FinFET and smaller dies).
silverblue - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Your post assumes AMD doesn't have a single product on their roadmap. In addition, as regards your last sentence, AMD do actually have products that undercut equally performing NVIDIA offerings. The 360 isn't worth it over the 950 (which is why I bought the latter), but despite the power consumption difference, AMD are certainly competitive as regards their graphics products more often than not.It's no accident that their server market share has plummeted, more so than their desktop CPU market share, due to Bulldozer. Doesn't it stand to reason that a good product with Zen would drag them back up from the depths in both markets, even if just a little? It's not as if AMD can't develop a good architecture, they just had to make the most of their failed experiment in order to actually have some income whilst they developed a replacement. It takes four or five years to bring out a completely new architecture.
Achaios - Saturday, January 23, 2016 - link
It is interesting to note that the last time AMD was really competitive in the CPU market was, um, 12 years ago (Feb 2004) when the newly released Prescott Pentium 4 CPU's were beaten in terms of gaming performance by the then "Athlon 64" CPU"s.In the space of these ensuing 12 years, AMD have failed to produce a CPU that like the "Athlon 64", would give INtel a run for their money.
It seems unlikely they will ever succeed, and that is bad for the end user.
beck2050 - Monday, January 25, 2016 - link
2015, the operating loss of $253 million. It's amazing year after year they can stay in business, let alone design new products.Sam Snead - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
I've made a ton of money by buying AMD stock when it's down and selling when it's up. I buy their CPUs and GPUs because they are less expensive and do what I want. And remember Nexgen? I sold their motherboards before they were absorbed by AMD. Still have a P100 or whatever. Thank you that it's America and we're not stuck with Intelisma!HighTech4US - Monday, April 11, 2016 - link
Wow buy low sell high. Who would ever have thought up such a system.Funny how only you know when exactly to buy and sell AMD.
You seem like gamblers I know who N E V E R lose.