AMD’s worrying downward spiral continued this quarter, with the graphics card and CPU manufacturer posting a net loss of $197 million for Q3 2015, along with an operating loss of $158 million. That first figure is the one you should have your eye on, as that’s the literal amount of money AMD was left out of pocket for the last quarter.
It’s the fourth quarter of losses in a row, so that’s a straight year now. Revenue is down from $1.43 billion at this point in 2014 to $1.06 billion this year. It’s a consequence of having very few new products on store shelves, other than an incremental leap in performance with its R300 series GPUs, and the enthusiast-tier Fury graphics cards. Movement on new CPU and APUs meanwhile has been practically non-existent. Compared to the last quarter AMD’s figures are actually up, but this isn’t exactly anything to write home about when posting nearly $200 million losses. To help ease these problems AMD has sold 85% ownership of its assembly and test facilities to Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics, in exchange for $371 million. “AMD delivered double-digit percentage sequential revenue growth in both of our segments in the third quarter,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su. “We continue to take targeted actions to improve long-term financial performance, build great products and simplify our business model. The formation of a joint venture of our back-end manufacturing assets is a significant step towards achieving these goals and strengthening our balance sheet.”
It doesn’t make for easy reading, indicating there is distress behind the scenes at AMD. At this stage though it’s best to think of AMD as a company in transition. Firms typically post operating losses when they start up due to heavy outgoings as they work to get things up and running. While AMD is no new kid on the block, these costs are tied to research into its next-generation of hardware. Once Zen CPUs and Greenland GPUs begin creeping onto the market in 2016 we should hopefully see a dramatic change in fortunes. One thing’s for sure, there an absolutely insane amount of pressure on AMD to deliver next year with must have products. Its CPU range has stagnated for years now, but there’s high hopes for Zen. As for its Greenland GPUs, we saw earlier just what we can expect, with Su claiming up to 100% performance boost over the current generation of graphics cards.
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