AMD saw record revenues for all of 2019 and the fourth quarter amid market share gains for its Ryzen and EPYC processors.
Fourth quarter 2019 revenues were $2.13 billion, an increase of 50% over the fourth quarter of 2018, primarily due to higher revenue in AMD’s computing and graphics segment.
Revenues for all of 2019 hit $6.73 billion, up by 4% over 2018.
CEO Lisa Su called the record levels “another major milestone” in the company’s 50-year history.
The computing and graphics segment revenue in fourth quarter hit $1.66 billion, an increase of 69% over the fourth quarter in 2018 due primarily to strong sales in Ryzen processors and Radeon gaming GPUs.
Su told analysts on an earnings call that PC sales are expected to be flat or slightly down in 2020, a position held by other chipmakers. In 2019, PC chipmakers benefited from commercial upgrades of PCs to Windows 10 models.
RELATED: Lenovo, HP and all PCs finish 2019 on wild ride
For the first quarter of 2020, AMD expects overall revenues of $1.8 billion, an increase of 42% year-over-year, but a decrease of 15% over the last quarter of 2019. That decrease was blamed on seasonality and a decrease in semi-custom revenue as customers anticipate next-generation products.
Su said AMD’s data center market growth is continuing in 2020. “We see it as a good market for cloud and enterprise,” she said. “The highest growth will be in servers.””
In the fourth quarter, the enterprise segment saw revenues of $465 million, up by 7% year-over-year on higher EPYC processor sales. Dell began shipping a full portfolio of servers powered by EPYC processors in the fourth quarter. There are more than 100 EPYC processor platforms in the market.
Su said that AMD’s second generation EPYC processor line called Rome is growing share with data center customers. Recently, AWS and Microsoft Azure have announced new cloud instances on Rome processors and two new supercomputers are being powered by Rome: the Expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and GENCI Joliot-Curie supercomputer in France.
AMD’s stock price was $50.53 at Tuesday’s market close, but dropped by 4% in after-hours trading, which analysts blamed on predictions of a first quarter 2020 revenue decline of 15% over the final quarter of 2019.
Reference:fierceelectronics.com/electronics/amd-breaks-revenue-records-for-2019-and-4q
