AMD hints analyst report about its crypto sales is wrong

Earlier this week, Susquehanna analyst Christopher Rolland downgraded AMD's stock on expectations of higher competition in the cryptocurrency mining market. Chinese firm Bitmain will soon launch its first Ethereum ASICs and this is expected to have a profound impact on mining demand for GPUs.

In his report, Rolland estimated that cryptocurrency demand makes up nearly 20 percent of AMD's revenue. Interestingly, AMD went through the unusual effort to dispel the analyst's memo. In a statement to the press, AMD downplays the importance of cryptocurrency demand for its GPUs.

Unfortunately, the firm didn't share new figures about how much of its revenue comes from miners; AMD merely points to an earlier statement that cryptocurrency accounted for a mid-single digit percentage in 2017. Furthermore, AMD tries to pull attention away from crypto, by highlighting its other growth opportunities in the CPU and GPU markets:

Yesterday a report was published on AMD which hypothesized very high revenue for Ethereum-related GPU sales. As a reminder, on our Q4’17 earnings conference call we stated that the percentage of annual revenue related to Blockchain was approximately mid-single digit percentage in 2017. We had significant growth in the GPU business outside of Blockchain in Q4’17 as we ramped our Radeon Vega products, our GPU compute products, and our Apple business. We also spoke about strength across the rest of our business with AMD Ryzen and AMD EPYC product momentum. We have very compelling long-term drivers for the company including PCs, servers and graphics and our Q1 2018 financial guidance reflects that.

We appreciate the time and attention that investors continue to pay to Blockchain and cryptocurrency, but would also like to keep it in perspective with the multiple other growth opportunities ahead for AMD.