AMD, the perennial underdog, just announced its latest quarterly earnings. Unsurprisingly, they’re not great: the company lost $146 million in the first quarter of 2013. While that’s not as bad as the fourth quarter of 2012 (-$473 million) or even the first quarter of 2012 (-$590 million), it’s not good either. AMD’s stock price has lost around four percent in after-hours trading.
“I think the best you can say is that at least they do not appear to be collapsing yet,” Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, told Ars.
Like the rest of the industry, AMD is struggling as PC sales are dropping fast. Intel just announced its reduction in profits earlier this week.
In an e-mail sent to Ars, spokesperson Drew Prairie outlined a “three phase turnaround plan,” involving reducing operating costs, executing the company’s product roadmap, and plotting a “return to profitability.” The final phase constitutes taking advantage of “high-growth opportunities in adjacent markets where AMD IP provides a competitive advantage.”
That's quite the tall order, though, as we'll detail in our two-part series (to be published next week) on the rise and fall of AMD. We talked with a number of former high-level executives for the feature. Here's a relevant passage from that piece:
AMD has been on a notable drop for nearly a decade now. To put it mildly, 2012 was a rough year: AMD lost more than $1 billion, effectively wiping out its $471 million profit in 2010 and its $491 million profit in 2011 (its two most profitable years in the last decade). During the last 15 years, AMD sustained a net loss of nearly $7 billion. The company has been downgraded by credit rating agencies, burned by lower demand for PCs (and hence, for its products), and even called "un-investable" by one Wall Street analyst.
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