It’s been a busy few days for financial results with important computer hardware producers Intel, Apple and AMD all coming out with their figures. All three have “done well” in their own ways, even AMD, which made a loss, surprised investors because the loss was much less than expected! Let’s have a look through the recent quarterly results one by one.
AMD feels the pinch but has a plan
AMD’s revenue was $1.16 billion and it made a loss of $473 million or 63 cents per share for the quarter. However, after adjustments for restructuring, the loss came out at just 14 cents per share. The market had been expecting a loss of 21 cents per share so AMD’s shares “soared” yesterday following these latest financial results. Shares were up nearly 10 per cent in trading.
AMD has been seen to be cutting jobs and selling off non-core assets to cut costs and raise cash. Also the company shows some encouraging trends, according to an analyst speaking to CNBC News. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Kevin Cassidy wrote “We believe management has set a prudent course of not only `skating to where the puck is going' but also taking a `hit `em where they ain't' strategy. In other words, AMD has developed an indirect strategy rather than confronting Intel directly in each market segment.”
Apple’s record revenue, iPhone and iPad sales
Apple’s revenue was a record $54.5 billion and it brought along a record $13.08 billion in net profits. Despite these positive results, which the FT called “good but not good enough”, shares fell nearly 10 per cent on fears of a second quarter slowdown and the results being a little less positive than expectations.
Alongside the cold hard financial results Apple gave us some interesting iDevice sales numbers. During the quarter ending 29 December 2012 Apple sold 47.8 million iPhones and 22.9 million iPads. Tim Cook let us know that these sales figures were up 78 per cent and 48 per cent on last year respectively.
Other Apple products fared less well. As you might expect iPods are becoming obsolete, in the same quarter last year 15.4 million were sold but that figure has fallen to 12.7 million in the most recent set of results. Macs have similarly declined only 4.1 million were sold compared to 5.2 million in the same quarter a year before.
Intel ship is steady despite muted demand
Intel’s revenue was $13.5 billion and it made profits of $2.5 billion during its fourth quarter. These results were not surprising to either the management or the markets and Intel shares were hardly impacted by the results.
“The fourth quarter played out largely as expected as we continued to execute through a challenging environment,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “We made tremendous progress across the business in 2012 as we entered the market for smartphones and tablets, worked with our partners to reinvent the PC, and drove continued innovation and growth in the data center.”
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Kevin Cassidy said that he thought Intel was “managing through this downturn pretty well”. He concluded that “The results show that the PC industry is still around and maybe it was slightly exaggerated that the death of the PC was here”.
It was noted by the BBC that Intel continues to invest heavily in R&D and that may be of concern to some short-term investors in the face of the PC market decline.
