AMD reports lukewarm results for Q1 2019 and confirms summer launches

Last year was the first of many when AMD was able to report a positive result and the company looked optimistically at 2019 as a result of several major launches. At the same time, a sharp decline was forecast during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2018, then miningThe hysteria caused graphics card sales to skyrocket.

When the company presents this year’s first quarter report, it appears that revenue landed USD 1.27 billion, which forecast a substantial decline from the same period last year. Profits for the quarter were completely sonic lower, however, AMD continues to increase its gross margin, which is now 41 percent.

In terms of departments, it is Computing and Graphics which accounts for the largest share of revenues and also the sharpest decline compared to last year. Revenue here landed USD 831 million with a positive operating profit of 16 million, compared to 1.115 billion and 138 million respectively in the first quarter of 2018.

The other major part of AMD’s business is Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom, which includes game consoles. Here, too, revenues were lower by USD 441 million and operating profit was 68 million, which is higher than last year 14 million despite higher revenues of 532 million.

The forecast for the second quarter of 2019 is USD 1.52 billion on the revenue side, plus or minus NOK 50 million. Compared to the same period in 2018, this corresponds to a decrease of 13 percent and even here lower sales of graphics cards are attributed to miners, as well as lower sales in the semi-custom category.

In comparison with the now presented first quarter, this is instead a forecast increase of 19 percent, which according to AMD can be attributed to increased sales from all parts of the business. The gross margin is also forecast to remain at 41 percent.

Several major launches in the summer of 2019

At the same time as AMD continues to manage to keep its head above water financially, the company has several large and important launches underway. During the quarterly report, it was confirmed that graphics cards with the Navi architecture will be released during the third quarter of the year, probably shortly after the processors in the Ryzen 3000 series with the Zen 2 architecture.

Since the end of 2018, AMD has been talking about the server processors in the Epyc family with the code name “Rome”, which will be released with up to 64 cores and 128 threads. Since then, the company has given many difficult-to-interpret announcements about the launch, but now there is concrete talk of a launch during the third quarter after the Ryzen 3000 series.

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