AMD Q4 revenue, profit beat expectations, forecast much higher
Microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices this afternoon reported Q4 revenue and profit that comfortably surpassed analysts' expectations, and a forecast for this quarter's revenue higher as well, sending shares sharply higher in late trading.
CEO Lisa Su remarked that AMD "significantly accelerated our business in 2020, delivering record annual revenue while expanding gross margin and more than doubling net income from 2019."
AMD has been making hay at Intel's expense, as its competitor has careened from one manufacturing delay to another over the last several years. Intel this month announced its CEO Bob Swan will pass the baton to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Meantime, AMD said in October it will acquire programmable logic chip maker Xilinx for $35 billion. Xilinx was originally going to report its own Q4 results after market close yesterday, but now says it will issue a report tomorrow, January 27th, after the close of market.
Revenue in the three months ended in December rose to $3.24 billion, yielding EPS of 52 cents.
Analysts had been modeling $3.03 billion and 47 cents a share.
For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion, which it said would be "driven by growth in all businesses." That is, again, much higher than consensus for $2.7 billion.
For the full year, the company expects revenue growth of 37%, it said. That would equate to $13.37 billion.
That is much higher than the 28% forecast of analysts, or $12.26 billion.
As with the quarterly outlook, AMD said the year forecast was "driven by growth in all businesses."
Su said the company's forecast "highlights the strength of our product portfolio and robust demand for high-performance computing across the PC, gaming and data center markets."
"We are excited about the opportunities ahead and very confident in our long-term strategy as we continue executing our leadership product roadmaps," added Su.
By business unit, the company's revenue from its Computing and Graphics chips business rose 18%, year over year, to $1.96 billion, which the company attributed to "strong sales of Ryzen™ processors."
Sales of server and semi-custom chips, including AMD's EPYC line of server microprocessors, rose by 176%, year over year, to $1.28 billion.
AMD shares initially rose 4% to $98.20 in late trading but later gave up gains and declined roughly 2%.