AMD misses but even is short 29% earnings growth

November 3, 2022: -On Tuesday, AMD shares rose nearly 6% in extended trading after the chipmaker indicated its server scrap business would grow in the quarters ahead, even as wages and quarterly guidance failed to meet Wall Street’s anticipations.

According to a statement, AMD’s revenue increased by 29% year over year in the third financial quarter, which concluded on September 24. Net income fell 93% to $66 million, mainly as of AMD’s $49 billion acquisition in February of Xilinx, a maker of chips known as field-programmable gate arrays.

CEO Lisa Su added on a discussion call with analysts AMD has been prepared for the PC market to be lackluster in the fiscal fourth quarter. On October 6, AMD issued initial results for the fiscal third quarter that lagged its guidance in August as stock decreased almost 14%, its most significant decline since March 2020.

For the full year, AMD said it is seeking $23.5 billion in revenue, down from the $26.3 billion projection the party gave in August. Analysts polled by Refinitiv had anticipated $23.88 billion. The company contracted its adjusted gross margin outlook to 52% from 54% in August.

AMD said its Data Center segment generated $1.61 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 45% and slightly below the StreetAccount consensus of $1.64 billion. The unit contains contributions from Xilinx and distributed computing startup Pensando, which AMD purchased for $1.9 billion.

The chipmaker is seeing a healthy market for shipments of its server chips that carry the code name Genoa. AMD plans to launch Epyc data center chips on November 10.

“We’ve had excellent progress at the North American cloud vendors, and we continue to believe that although there may be some near-term, let’s call it optimization, of, let’s call it individual footprints and efficiencies at individual cloud vendors, over the medium term,” Su said. “As we go into 2023, we expect growth in that demand, particularly customers moving more workloads to AMD, just given the strength of our product portfolio and overall general coming forward.”

Su said cloud revenue more than folded and increased sequentially, while revenue from server makers targeting big companies was down successively. She said AMD has seen enterprise customers taking longer to make decisions and being slightly more conservative on capital expenditures.

The data center business “at least for now, looks decent, and quite a bit better than what’s going on with Intel,” said Stacy Rasgon, senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, in an interview on CNBC. Overtime” after AMD announced its results. “There’s a lot of uncertainty close to what they were going to say about the data center, particularly in the wake of Intel’s report where Intel had called for the market to decline in Q4. This is probably why the stock is up now. The guide is quite weak, but it seems likely to be isolated to PCs.”

The Gaming segment produced $1.63 billion in revenue. That was up about 14%, in sequence with the $1.63 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount. The company touted healthy demand for console chips for Microsoft and Sony as the holidays approached.

The Embedded detail, including some Xilinx sales, delivered $1.3 billion, up from $79 million in the year-ago quarter and line with the $1.3 billion StreetAccount consensus.