14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices may have managed to keep the tone of its activities relatively upbeat, but that wasn't enough to avoid the hard times that fell upon it during the third quarter of the year.
AMD actually expected a revenue decline during that period (July-September, 2012), but not nearly as severe as the one that occurred.
The CPU, APU and GPU maker forecasted a 1% decrease, give or take 3%, but its preliminary financial results paint a bleaker picture, where revenue fell around 10% sequentially (as in compared to Q2).
AMD will have the complete report ready by October 18, 2012, when it will say what it expects from the fourth quarter after such a showing.
The revenue drop is a consequence of several things, primarily a “challenging macroeconomic environment,” as the company puts it.
Product demand, for one, was weaker than expected, enough to negatively impact the utilization of AMD's back-end manufacturing facilities.
The same problem led to low average selling prices and may have contributed to the Trinity APUs being released even cheaper than anyone foresaw.
An inventory write-down of around $100 million, due to lower anticipated future demand for certain products, couldn't have helped matters.
All in all, AMD isn't doing too well, and no one can say that the only one responsible is Microsoft Windows 8 OS, or the negative effect it has had on demand for PCs and related products (many are delaying new PC purchases until the operating system debuts, on October 26).
And here we might as well mention that rumored employee purge we learned about at the start of the month (October 2012). Bureaucracy is overwhelming AMD little by little, it seems.
For the immediate future, it will fall to the A-Series and Hondo APUs to recover what has been lost, or at least stave off further problems until the Sea Islands GPU family is ready (in 2013).