AMD posts first profit in over a year

In their last financial year update on 29 December 2012, CEO Rory Read promised to return the company to profitability in 2013. AMD announced on 17 October that they were posting their first profit in over a year, returning the company to a more stable position in the market.

In Q3 2013 the company posted a profit of US$48-million on revenue of US$1.46 billion.

AMD Q3 2013 company results

AMD Q3 2013 graphics results

Read says that a large part of the return to profitability comes from their deals with Sony and Microsoft for their next-generation consoles, but does not detail how much they’re worth, although he does say that they have shipped “millions of units to each console vendor.”

The deal with Microsoft for the Xbox One was widely reported to be worth over US$3-billion, but this has not yet been reflected in AMD’s financial statements.

A large part of the profit comes from AMD’s licensing model that now allows customers to request and build custom hardware for niche use-cases. That’s what AMD means by “semi-custom” revenue, which does include their console efforts as well.

The jump for the graphics department is quite interesting. Comparing Q3 2012 and Q3 2013, they almost doubled their sales. The Computing solutions department saw a decline, which shows that AMD’s share in the desktop and laptop market is shrinking.

Although the company is technically profitable, they’re still a long way away from being back on their feet. AMD additionally won’t be concentrating on the high-end desktop and laptop markets as much as they used to, because their future growth will be in mobile devices and in ARM-based products designed for kiosks, servers, and high-performance computing applications.

However, the company will still be supporting their fans on the desktop with the launch of socket FM2+ and the new Kaveri APU family, due for a launch in Q1 2014.

Kaveri will feature two Steamroller modules and integrated Radeon GCN (Graphics Core Next) cores for improved graphics performance and will be the first step into AMD’s heterogeneous computing initiative, where GPUs are used to improve overall system performance in games and multi-threaded applications.