AMD shares down as EPYC ramp and first-quarter outlook disappoints

While Intel's fourth-quarter earnings were better than anticipated, AMD's earnings report was a mixed bag. The chip designer reported record fourth quarter revenue of $2.13 billion and net income of $170 million, or 15 cents per share. On an adjusted basis, AMD reported net income of $383 million and earnigns per share of $0.32. Revenue was $20 million higher than analyst estimates and non-GAAP EPS was 1 cent better than expected.

Years ago, when AMD's CPU business went down the drain, the company stopped reporting CPU and GPU revenue on seperate lines. As such, we don't really know how well the Ryzen and EPYC CPUs are doing as everything gets lumped together. The company's Computing and Graphics segment revenue was up 69 percent year-over-year to $1.66 billion thanks to strong Ryzen and Radeon sales. Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment revenue on the other hand was up just 7 percent year-over-year due to lower semi-custom sales, partly offset by higher EPYC sales. Revenue of Computing and Graphics products was higher than analyst estimates, but Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom revenue was nearly $140 million below Wall Street expectations, which may indicate that the EPYC ramp is going slower than expected.

“2019 marked a significant milestone in our multi-year journey as we successfully launched and ramped the strongest product portfolio in our 50-year history,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We delivered significant margin expansion and increased profitability as we gained market share with our Ryzen and EPYC processors. Our focused execution and the investments we made in our high-performance computing roadmaps position us well for continued growth in 2020 and beyond.”

Interesting aspects of the earnings release include the fact that gross margin is now 45 percent, a big increase versus 38 percent a year ago and 43 percent in Q3 2019. Principal debt was also reduced by $524 million in Q4 2019.

For the current quarter, AMD expects revenue of $1.8 billion, plus or minus $50 million, and a further expansion of gross margin to 46 percent. AMD's Q1 outlook is below Wall Street estimates, which called for $1.86 billion. For the full year, AMD expects sales to grow 28 percent to 30 percent.

AMD shares fell 3.94 percent in after-hours trading to $48.54.