AMD Investing Heavily to “Win the Graphics Battle”

AMD has been having a rough time as of late, reporting a net loss of $197 million during the third-quarter of 2015, forcing the company into initiating a restructure that will cut 5% of its workforce globally. AMD’s EMEA Component Sales Manager Neil Spicer, however, has told CRN that he is “confident” that the company’s fortunes will turn, and if it “invest[s] heavily” it can “[win] the graphics war”.

“From a personal stance, I am confident [we can be profitable],” Spicer said. “I believe we are working with exactly the right customers, and over the last few years we have become much simpler to execute and do business with.”

“Moving forwards to 2016, we have to have profitable share growth,” he said, adding that AMD must carefully invest in the right areas. “So it’s choosing the right business to go after, both with the company itself and the ecosystem of partners. There is no point in us as a vendor chasing unprofitable partners.”

AMD is still hoping to ride the wave of Windows 10, released this Summer, and the upgrade cycle it has already initiated. “We want to focus [in the areas] we are good at – that’s where we are going to invest heavily. That’s things like winning the graphics battle with gaming and so forth, and we want to be part of this Windows 10 upgrade cycle,” Spicer said.

“Our hope is through our education and market knowledge, that the reseller building that PC for the local dentist or butchers will be building it through an AMD platform,” he added. “Because for £300, or whatever price is decided between the reseller and the business, we should be able to bring better or more performance for the same price point, than our competitors.”

In addition to more focused investment, Spicer say the company intends to form closer relations with its resellers, making the business of selling AMD products more profitable for every party involved. “With the channel you have to measure what’s important to channel customers, so with things like profitability in the channel,” he said. “We want people happily making money on selling AMD products. We don’t have the luxury of being a loss leader; people want profitability selling our products.”

“We are really focused on profitability in the channel, and part of that is also to clear inventory. We don’t want customers sat on weeks and weeks of inventory, because they are putting cash on something that is not selling. So we focus heavily on sell out. That’s with a number of things, such as marketing resources, education training. So we are focused heavily on that from a channel perspective.”

AMD will also no doubt also be hoping that GlobalFoundaries’ newly-developed 14nm FinFET process will give the company a boost.