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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  • Wreckage - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    I'm always amazed that they can lose $100,000,000+ every few months and stay in business.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    The only quarters where AMD is "profitable" are the product of exaggerating loses slightly in other quarters. AMD has lost billions the last decade and there is no outlook it will ever get any better.

    So the big question is - why bother running it? The only thing AMDs existence achieves is to theoretically undermine Intel's de-facto monopoly. It only makes Intel look less of a monopolist, but it doesn't push Intel to innovate or improve the value of its products.

    The last time AMD stood a chance to turn into a profitable company, it was destroyed from within, overpaying for ATi, just to have AMD+ATi worth a small fraction of what it paid for ATi, which led to losing its fabs, further decreasing profit margins. And now AMD is stuck forever right where Intel wants it to be - an impotent pseudo competitor.

    Who has interest in funding AMD... except Intel?
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    "The only thing AMDs existence achieves is to theoretically undermine Intel's de-facto monopoly. It only makes Intel look less of a monopolist, but it doesn't push Intel to innovate or improve the value of its products."

    To a lesser extent, the same could be said about their relationship with Nvidia.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    AMD is fairly competitive to nvidia.
  • HighTech4US - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    Yet 8 out of 10 buy Nvidia.

    Nvidia 81.1% market share vs 18.8% for AMD.

    https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1881582
  • ddriver - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    I find this strange, there is nothing in the product lines of both companies to justify those figures. I myself mostly run radeons, but I don't really care about gaming, radeons offer better FP64 performance for the $.
  • JoeMonco - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link

    And next to nothing uses FP64 so that better performance matters to next to no average consumer.
  • The_Assimilator - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link

    Pretty simple, nVIDIA released Maxwell 2 before AMD released Fiji. Maxwell 2, in particular GTX 970, was a killer price/performance point for people who had been waiting to upgrade. By the time Fiji arrived, not only was it too expensive for what it brought to the table, its market had pretty much dried up. Oh, and there's the fact that nVIDIA has a competent marketing department.

    AMD's consistent recycling of old products instead of introducing new ones, and hyping their new products while lying about their features (see: "Fury X is a great overclocker") doesn't endear consumers to them.
  • xthetenth - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link

    It's interesting that the GTX 970 is so popular when the 290 has been a superior price/performance pick for the majority of the time since the 970 dropped. And to think the 960 actually sold when there was usually a $250 290. People are bad at doing their research and all too willing to do companies' marketing for them.
  • Notmyusualid - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link

    Sorry to nit-pick, but on the Steam hardware survey:

    http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc

    First graph you see, last 6 months data, 26.23% used ATI (AMD). 54.61% for Nvidia.

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