14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that, while AMD did seem to paint a more or less promising vision of the future during its financial analyst presentation, not all market analysts share the same opinion, one in particular being especially reserved.
There are always factors that can be seen as favorable or not so favorable to a certain company's likely future performance.
The ratio between them, and their importance, helps market analysts get a feel of what to expect for the future, as well as how they should rank various companies.
Until recently, Advanced Micro Devices was ranked at Market Outperform by JMP Securities analyst Alex Gauna.
Now, that rating has been lowered by one step, to Market Perform, because of several reasons, three being more relevant.
For one, the outfit seems to not be doing very well on the mobile computer segment, even though its mobile platform has seen a number of design wins.
“The company seems unable to convert consumer notebook design wins into revenue share gains,” is what the analyst feels.
Another reason for the downgrade in rank is that NVIDIA is likely to steal some of the share that AMD gained in the GPU market.
As consumers know, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU maker held a monopoly over the DirectX 11 video card market for about half a year.
Now that NVIDIA has seriously quickened its activity in this area, even launching GTX 500 cards, it expects to regain what it lost bit by bit.
The third reason why the JPM analyst is skeptical about AMD's future performance is that AMD lost some of its share in the server market.
All in all, “industry checks pointing toward end-market weakness as well as disadvantaged product positioning relative to Intel and ARM-based competition.“
No doubt, the actual outcome will be decided by the Ontario and Zacate 100 design wins and by whether or not AMD manages to raise its ASPs (average selling prices).